The TL;DR is that the author created a browser extension that sent “unfollow” requests to everything in the user’s feed one-by-one. He argued that unfollowing e

The TL;DR is that the author created a browser extension that sent “unfollow” requests to everything in the user’s feed one-by-one. He argued that unfollowing everything made Facebook less addictive because it made the news feed empty. The tool also reported some amount of data about the user’s feed back to him for statistical purposes, but he claims the data was minimal and only used to ensure the tool was “working”. I think the missing piece of this puzzle might be that he used his personal account to develop Facebook API tools, and Facebook has a low tolerance for tools that abuse their API and send user data to 3rd parties, regardless of the developer’s intentions.