A programmer from Great Britain created “Unfollow Everything”, which promoted as the solution to the problem of modern man who spends his whole day on “social media”. Yes, we do it in Greece too!
What Louis Barclay created allows users to automatically “unfollow” all friends they have on Facebook and the pages they follow and thus empty the newsfeed. At the same time, they can communicate with whoever they want through this platform.
His work was ready in July 2020 and he published it on “Google Chrome”; whoever wanted to download it for free! He soon was contacted by a research team of the “University of Neuchâtel”(Switzerland), to inform him that the team would like to use the influence of zero flow on the happiness of Facebook users, as well as the time spent on the “social network”. This is what set the reaction mechanism of the tech giant in motion! It had already “banned” a team of researchers from the “New York University”, who were working on a relevant study with the Swiss university. The argument that had been used was:
“we want to protect the privacy of our users!”.
Last July, the lawyers of “Facebook Inc.” sent Barclay a legal document demanding the closure of “Unfollow Everything”. At a second time, he was expelled from Facebook and Instagram!
In fact, “Facebook Inc.” blocked him from its products “for 15 years”, with “Unfollow Everything” having, until that time, 2500 active users every week and 10,000 “downloads”!
He revealed everything, earlier this month, through Slate. As he said:
“My work had just begun to be successful. People loved her; just as I was informed by the comments and “emails” I received from people, telling me that “Unfollow Everything” changed their lives! This summer Facebook threatened me with legal proceedings and disabled my project from its products!
The company’s behavior is not only against competition, but also against consumers! We are trapped in platforms —because of their undeniable usefulness— but, at the same time, they forbid us from choosing the way we use them! The loser of the case is the user, and the cost is estimated at billions of hours we waste on Facebook!”
When the Briton went to a lawyer to come up with his next actions, he learned that —once he’s based in the UK— if he lost the trial, he would also pay Facebook’s legal fees!
“a trillion-dollar colossus! I couldn’t take the risk.”
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