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Unfollowing as a Service
The court case that could dramatically change the Facebook Feed. ALSO: Amazon and Pinterest's ad business, TikTok Shop enforcement, and LinkedIn adds gaming
by Tod Maffin (LinkedIn • social media)
Today's News
FACEBOOK • Lawsuit Hopes to Open Up the Feed
A lawsuit filed this morning against Meta says US law forces companies to let users customize their social feeds with unofficial add-ons.
These add-ons have existed in the past. The few that remain are constantly being deliberately kneecapped by Facebook engineers, who are trying to keep people from seeing their feed in a way Meta doesn’t like, or seeing who unfollowed you.
Interestingly, the lawsuit argues that the law that shields social networks from liability that arises from the content of their users — known as Section 230 — also requires more flexibility from the platforms.
Unfollowing as a Service
The suit was filed by a software developer who is working on an extension to let people more easily unfollow friends, groups, and pages. That’s something you can do now, but you have to do it one at a time. The lawsuit is being bankrolled by a First Amendment advocacy group at Columbia University.
Three years ago, Meta permanently banned a British developer who made a tool similar to this fellow’s.
At the time, that developer told Slate:
I still remember the feeling of unfollowing everything for the first time. It was near-miraculous. I had lost nothing, since I could still see my favorite friends and groups by going to them directly.
But I had gained a staggering amount of control. I was no longer tempted to scroll down an infinite feed of content.
The time I spent on Facebook decreased dramatically.
Facebook Wants Full Control
That’s the real reason Meta hates these, of course — despite what Meta’s p.r. people say about the security of the platform, integrity of the feed, blah blah blah.
Besides the time spent on platform — a critically important metric that investors watch closely — Facebook doesn’t want people to easily unfollow the very entities that provide the ad network signals on what people are interested in, though even that feels like a bit of an out-of-date throwback to the era of interests targeting.
John Morris, a principal at the Internet Society, a nonprofit that promotes open development of the internet, says that, to his knowledge, Zuckerman’s strategy “hasn’t been used before, in terms of using Section 230 to grant affirmative rights to users,” noting that a judge would likely take that claim seriously.
Today’s Trivia
Guess and win! Take a guess below, and you’ll be entered in our monthly draw for a year’s Premium Newsletter!
Which two companies' court cases influenced the creation of Section 230? |
GOOGLE • Have Your Keywords Been Auto-Paused?
Heads-up if you run Google ad campaigns — your low-activity keywords may soon stop running.
The company has been emailing advertisers this week saying positive keywords in search ad campaigns will automatically pause if they haven’t generated impressions in over a year.
The rule, of course, intended to help de-clutter ad accounts full of underperforming keywords.
A Double-Edged Sword
Personally, I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, it’s true that many ad accounts probably are full of basically dead keywords and this will make things simpler. But still, I’ve never liked the idea of ad platforms going in and just changing the parameters of a campaign — even if those parameters are underperforming.
A notification recommending you remove them is one thing. Straight-up deletion is another.
Can You Opt Out?
You can’t really opt-out of this, but if you do spot Google pausing a keyword and you still want it, you will be able to unpause it. But they say they’ll re-pause that keyword again if you still don’t get any impressions over the following three months.
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