Edit: to clarify confusion, author of the extension worked with university to collect user data to use for study: https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-every...
As an example of automated user interactions: It's clearly not allowed to use an extension that will automatically follow on Instagram in order to increase your follower count.
Sadly, although this extension should morally be categorized differently, it falls into the same category per their rules — automatically following is treated the same as automatically unfollowing. (In fact, a common feature of automatic follower bots is to automatically unfollow afterwards).
A few months after I published Unfollow Everything, academics at the University of Neuchâtel, in Switzerland, expressed interest in using it to study the News Feed’s impact on the amount of time spent on Facebook and the happiness of the platform’s users. We began working together. The university recruited people to join two study groups: one where participants deleted their News Feeds using Unfollow Everything and a control group where participants left their feeds intact. 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. (For regular Unfollow Everything users, the only Facebook-related data shared was the ratio of followed profiles to total profiles, a metric that helped me ensure the tool was working.)
Again: For regular Unfollow Everything users, the only Facebook-related data shared was the ratio of followed profiles to total profiles, a metric that helped me ensure the tool was working.
https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-every...
The "data sharing" claim, which you've repeated several times in this thread, is as bogus as any other FB have proposed.
It would certainly read far more charitably toward FB on HN, in US Senate and House hearings, and at the FTC, FCC, and DoJ.
But that's just me.