Zuck vs. Zuck: 7 thoughts

This week, news broke that US academic Ethan Zuckerman is suing Meta for the right to launch Unfollow Everything 2.0, inspired by the Unfollow Everything tool I built, and which got me banned by Meta.

For a complete overview, I suggest the write-up in Wired, as well as Zuckerman’s own piece on the case. Here are my 7 thoughts on the suit:

1)

Facebook banned me without warning. After I made it clear in my very first reply to them that I gave out Unfollow Everything for free to help people, they said a huge ‘Oh jeeez’ accompanied by a facepalm, apologised for their bullying letter, restored my accounts, and we parted ways amicably.

Just kidding! They could not have cared less, and carried on pursuing me for nearly a year.

If they had treated me a little more fairly, I wouldn’t have written about their ban in Slate, Zuckerman would never have heard of Unfollow Everything, and this suit wouldn’t exist.

Now, for once, they’re facing consequences for using their trillion-dollar might to bully a solo developer. And I’m lucky enough to be the solo developer in question. Hence the GIF.

2) Most people aren’t so lucky

I’m one of probably hundreds of people who have received cease-and-desists from Big Tech for building something in the public interest. But I’m one of the vanishingly rare cases where the substance of the cease-and-desist might end up being challenged in court.

Look at the case of the NYU Ad Observatory, for instance. It was run by a goddamn famous university! And yet the researchers behind it were banned from Facebook, and there’s never been a day in court to decide whether that was legal or not.

That’s because going to court can be a disaster for myriad reasons, even if you’re completely in the right. Time, money, stress.

For me, personally, it’s amazing that Unfollow Everything 2.0 is going to court. I’m over the moon, not to mention insanely grateful to Zuckerman for taking on this huge burden. But the exception proves the rule. Too many people building great software to undermine Big Tech’s power get bullied, and in basically all cases, Big Tech gets away with it. Not to mention all the people who don’t build great software because they know where they’ll end up.

The answer? Regulation. Please don’t fall asleep, I promise I won’t mention the R-word again.

3) Meta’s cease-and-desist calculus will change

But back to the good news: this suit is a giant exercise in calling Meta’s bluff. Even if it never gets to court, the fact that it’s been launched will give Meta (and others) pause for thought every time they send out a spurious cease-and-desist, especially against developers building in the public interest.

They’ll know their bluff might be called, and adjust accordingly.

(Or maybe they won’t. But it makes me feel good to say that they will, and we’ll probably never know either way.)

4) And users may gain more control over Big Tech

As Cory Doctorow has noted, this case could help disenshittify the internet, by allowing more adversarial interoperability:

“If Zuckerman is successful, he will set a precedent that allows toolsmiths to provide internet users with a wide variety of automation tools that customize the information they see online.”

Mike Masnick describes these as middlewares, and they’re my seriously unsexy dream. It’s what Unfollow Everything was all about — giving users a way to manage their Facebook usage that doesn’t rely on Facebook’s own software.

Crucial, because Facebook would never have built the Unfollow Everything feature themselves, depriving users of choice over how to use their product.

You might not think this is a big deal. For me, it’s huge. The waking hours we spend on digital devices will likely only keep increasing. The existence of this kind of middleware (or nudgeware, as I like to call it) could mean the difference between us deciding how we spend our time vs. Big Tech deciding for us.

5) But Meta’s a company that doesn’t feel things

Meta’s legal bullying caused me many sleepless nights, and made me retreat into my shell like a tortoise for a number of years.

Now they will face the misery they deserve, for everything they have done to me!

Nope. This suit might cause a mild frown from Nick Clegg for approximately 1.3 seconds. There’ll be no human moment of someone admitting guilt, feeling bad, having regrets.

In fact, the likeliest human impact on the Meta side is that some of their lawyers celebrate being able to charge more hours at an extortionate rate. They might even want to use the same GIF that I did.

That’s the injustice of a trillion dollar company going after an individual. The individual has a properly shit time, the trillion dollar company barely bats an eyelid.

6) Jurisdiction affects justice

Do I regret not suing Meta myself? No. As a UK resident, I signed up to Facebook terms that meant I’d have to sue in Ireland — or possibly in the UK using some of our Great British Consumer Laws.

But, as I found when talking to UK and Ireland lawyers after it happened, both those jurisdictions have legal systems where I’d have to pay (probably huge) costs of Facebook’s lawyers if I lost.

So I’d have to first find a billionaire to foot the bill, and convince them to put aside essentially unlimited funds, because I wouldn’t even know how much Facebook’s lawyers would cost until later in the proceedings (which is why crowdfunding wouldn’t work — once you know how much you have to raise, your risk is too high if you fail).

Even then, without an organization backing me — think PR team, in-house legal advice — I would have been overwhelmed. And as someone who’s self-employed, I wouldn’t have had a stable, benevolent employer to ask for time off to go to court. My employer is me, and he’s a proper asshole.

7) It’s ZOOK, not Zuck

Finally, to show my infinite gratitude to Zuckerman, I’m hereby boosting awareness of the fact that his name is pronounced ‘ZOOK er man’, making the headline of this article ‘ZOOK vs. Zuck’.

As someone who frequently gets called ‘LouiS’ with a hard ‘s’ at the end, instead of the correct pronunciation ‘LouiE’, I feel his pain. OK, it’s extremely mild — but I think still technically qualifies as a pain.

Thanks, Zook.