Louis Barclay is an engineer, co-founder of Cloakist, Nudge and Unfollow Everything, who I had been using Facebook since 2006 And now the social network has blocked his account for life and also his Instagram profile. The reason, according to Barclay, is because the company doesn’t like his software invention.
Beyond this, the engineer has explained in an open letter that during the summer, Facebook sent him a letter threatening legal action and required you to commit not to re-create tools that interact with Facebook or its other services. The threat also led to the permanent disabling of his Facebook and Instagram accounts.
Five hours after I tweeted this, I received a cease-and-desist letter from Facebook’s lawyers
They told me I’d been banned from Facebook for life because I make Unfollow Everything, an extension to help people use Facebook less
Here’s the full story: https: //t.co/Xkw3GBVUkX
– Louis Barclay (@louisbarclay) October 7, 2021
However, although in the tweet published a few months ago he had said that his account was disabled, something that he defined as a utopia, I had not disclosed the complete information until now, where he relates the threat of legal action and is required not to create tools that interfere with the use of social networks of the empire of Mark Zuckerberg.
And these data come to us at a key moment in which a former employee of the firm has revealed that the managers of this empire of social networks do not care about misinformation, because the priority of the company is to make money above all else. In the News Feed, Facebook’s algorithms decide what content we consume each time and what the Louis Barclay extension seeks is for users to decide how to navigate.
MEGA GUÍA IMPROVES FACEBOOK SECURITY and PRIVACY
What the Unfollow Everything extension does
If you stop following everything on Facebook – all your friends, groups and pages – your News Feed is empty. This does not make you stop being friends within the platform. You are still connected and you can check their profiles if you want or write messages to them. But by unfollowing everything, you delete your News Feed. In this way, Facebook is not selecting what you see, but you are browsing the publications, groups or people you want to see.
For the engineer, more control is gained over Facebook as it removes “the temptation to scroll through an infinite content feed“He comments on his personal experience that” the time he spent on Facebook was drastically reduced. Overnight, my addiction to Facebook became manageable. “
Actually, we can unfollow, one by one, each contact and group or page. But it is a long task and what the Barclay extension does is unfollow all profiles at the same time. This tool was on the Chrome Store since July 2020 for free.
And almost a year after the launch of Unfollow Everything, Facebook sent him a letter demanding that he remove the tool. Too told him that he had permanently deactivated his Facebook account, which had been active for 15 years and where she had her contacts from all over the world.
And the engineer explains that “alluding to a provision of its terms of service that intends to link even former Facebook users, Facebook also required me not to recreate a tool interact with Facebook or its many other services in any way. “That is, according to this information, when someone uses (or has used in the past) Facebook, they agree not to create tools that interact with this platform.
Result: Unfollow Everything no longer exists
With all of this, yet another David vs. Golliath story emerged. Louis Barclay consulted lawyers in his country of residence, the United Kingdom. They told him that if there was a lawsuit and he lost, he would have to pay the costs of a lawsuit, which could be high. “Facebook is a trillion dollar company, but I couldn’t afford that risk, so Unfollow Everything no longer exists“, explained the engineer.
Barclay considers that this behavior “is not only anti-competitive, but also anti-consumer”, since limits the ability of its users to act within its services and does not allow everyone to use social networks as they want.
This social giant is not going through its best moments. To the secrets revealed by the former employee of the company, a few days ago, her services, WhatsApp. Facebook and Instagram went down around the world for hours in an unprecedented event (the previous time this mishap lasted much less time than now).
In addition, the controversy that internally knows that its services harm the mental health of adolescents, while denying it in public To talk about the benefits of its controversial Instagram Kids, they have led it to announce the (at least temporary) brake on this new service, which was its big bet.