SAN FRANCISCO—The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University appeared this week before a federal district court in Northern California to oppose Meta’s motion to dismiss Zuckerman v. Meta, a case arguing that Section 230 protects tools that empower people to control what they see on social media. Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley ruled from the bench, granting Meta’s motion but leaving the door open for Zuckerman to return to court.

The following can be attributed to Ramya Krishnan, a senior staff attorney at the Knight Institute, who argued the case. 

We’re disappointed the court believes Professor Zuckerman needs to code the tool before the court resolves the case. We continue to believe that section 230 protects user empowering tools, and look forward to the court considering that argument at a later time.

At issue in the lawsuit is a browser extension proposed by Professor Ethan Zuckerman called Unfollow Everything 2.0 that would allow Facebook users to more efficiently unfollow friends, groups, and pages, and, in doing so, to effectively turn off their newsfeeds. It would also enable people to donate their data to Zuckerman’s research study exploring how increasing people’s control over their online experience affects their behavior and well-being. In 2021, Meta (then-Facebook) sent an aggressive cease-and-desist letter to a U.K.-based developer named Louis Barclay, based on his development of a very similar tool, called Unfollow Everything. As he explained in an op-ed at the time, Barclay ultimately took down his tool rather than risk being sued. Zuckerman now hopes to release Unfollow Everything 2.0, but he anticipates that Meta would threaten to sue him, too.

While much of the public debate around Section 230 centers around the provision that affords broad legal protection to social media platforms, this lawsuit relies on a separate provision protecting the developers of third-party tools that allow people to curate what they see online, 

Read more about the case here.

Lawyers on the case, in addition to Krishnan, include Alex Abdo, Jennifer Jones, and Talya Nevins for the Knight First Amendment Institute, and Max Schoening for Qureshi Law.

For more information, contact: Adriana Lamirande, [email protected].