Facebook has reportedly banned the developer of Unfollow Everything, a browser extension that allowed the social network"s users to get rid of the News Feed, from its platforms, writes PCMAG.

Unfollow Everything developer Louis Barclay revealed the ban in an Oct. 7 blog post for Future Tense. “This summer, Facebook sent me a cease-and-desist letter threatening legal action. It permanently disabled my Facebook and Instagram accounts. And it demanded that I agree to never again create tools that interact with Facebook or its other services”, - he said.

Barclay says he released the first version of Unfollow Everything to the Chrome Web Store - a central repository for extensions to the Google Chrome browser - in July 2020 as a free download. Facebook users could install the extension to unfollow their friends, the Groups they had joined, and the Pages they had liked so they would have an empty News Feed.

He later collaborated with researchers at the University of Neuchâtel on a study that compared a group that cleared out their News Feed with Unfollow Everything to a control group that didn"t. This appears to be what drew Facebook’s ire, and based on similar bans the company has issued to other researchers, one would guess it"s ostensibly because of this aspect of the study:

“Participants agreed to share limited and anonymous information - specifically, the amount of time they spent on Facebook, the number of times they visited the site, and the number of friends, groups, and pages they were following and not following, both in total and broken down by category.