"Why I'm Suing Meta”
What rights should users have to control how they use social networks? That's a question Ethan Zuckerman is trying to answer with a lawsuit against Meta, the owners of Facebook and Instagram, over a piece of software called Unfollow Everything. Facebook has blocked a previous version of the tool, but Ethan and the Knight First Amendment Institute argue that existing US internet law permits users to block and filter content they encounter online. This legal argument offers a solution to many contemporary problems with social media, beyond changes in platform governance or government regulation: a market for software users could choose to use to have increased control over Facebook and other tools. We'll talk about the case, the broader phenomenon of "middleware" as a way of mitigating some of the problems with social media, and the role academics can have in strategic litigation.
Ethan Zuckerman is associate professor of public policy, information and communication at UMass Amherst. His lab is exploring alternative business and governance models for social media, and studying global usage of online video through a large corpus of randomly sampled YouTube and TikTok videos.
