Louis Barclay is the developer behind Unfollow Everything, a tool to delete your Facebook News Feed. The tool earned him a lifetime ban from Meta products in 2021, and led to a high-profile lawsuit against Meta by UMass Amherst’s Ethan Zuckerman.
Louis is passionate about giving consumers more control over the tech platforms they use, and has spent 8 years building open source tools to do exactly that. Louis’s fellowship at the Applied Social Media Lab will focus on building a platform for researchers to easily deploy and test interventions on social media platforms. Instead of building from scratch every time they want to test; e.g. a prompt to encourage civil discussions, researchers will simply be able to plug and play with the interventions platform.
