Qureshi Law Joins Knight First Amendment Institute in Filing a Lawsuit Against Meta

Qureshi Law is proud to join the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University in filing a lawsuit today against Meta in the Northern District of California. Filed on behalf of Ethan Zuckerman—a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst—the lawsuit asks the court to recognize that federal law empowers people to use tools to curate and control their social media experiences, including their Facebook news feed. Mr. Zuckerman would like to release a tool he’s calling Unfollow Everything 2.0—which would effectively allow Facebook users to turn off their news feeds—but hasn’t yet done so because he’s afraid Meta will sue him. In 2021, Meta (then-Facebook) sent an aggressive cease-and-desist letter to another developer to halt his creation of a very similar tool to the one Mr. Zuckerman seeks to release.

In the words of Mr. Zuckerman, “I’m suing Facebook to make it better. The major social media companies have too much control over what content their users see and don’t see.”

You can read the full complaint here.