Anthony Albanese has a good line for his United Nations speech in New York this month: Australians get to switch off the algorithm.
Like the teen social media ban, it is a popular idea that fits in one sentence, and the prime minister will take it to the UN as a model for others. It’ll win votes back home in Australia.
The trouble is what the switch does once you flick it – and what it doesn’t do.
The algorithm uses swaths of data to guess what you’ll buy and what will keep you scrolling. It’s the system that has made social media so addictive, and so destructive.
Turn it off under the model Communications Minister Anika Wells announced on Tuesday, and you’ll just see the accounts you already follow.
Consent campaigner Chanel Contos has spent the past nine months warning us of the issues with social media algorithms: the 16-year-old boy who has spent a year marinating in gym content, then hustle culture, then the online sludge that tells him women are the reason his life is hard. He follows 40 of those accounts now.
Under the government’s new “My Feed, My Way” initiative, he opts out – and still sees 40 manosphere accounts in a row.
That’s because the algorithm has already won before he’s seen the off switch.
This masthead ran the experiment last week: a fake profile for a 17-year-old boy was served manosphere content on TikTok within 13 minutes.
This is the flaw at the centre of an otherwise serious and commendable bill, and it is why Contos has spent nine months arguing for the opposite.
Contos is proposing an “opt in” model that would return the default feed to something closer to 2016: chronological posts from accounts a user actually chooses to follow. She calls it affirmative consent applied to a screen.
The dangers of doing nothing are real: men who hold the attitudes manosphere content promotes are 17 times more likely to have hit a partner, according to research she cited at the National Press Club.
She has warned it would be “too easy for big tech to design schemes that appear as structural reform”.
Contos is right to be cynical. The likes of Meta and TikTok will probably opt for malicious compliance, burying the switch under five sub-menus or making the chronological feed so clunky that users give up and opt straight back in to getting whatever the algorithm feeds them.
In fact, this is exactly what Meta did three years ago when Europe mandated an opt-out feed: it buried the option deep in its menus and reset to the algorithmic feed every time a user closed the app. That behaviour drew a lawsuit in the Netherlands and an investigation by Ireland’s tech regulator.
Then there is the glaring blind spot: advertising.
Recommendation and ad targeting are separate systems. Opt out of a personalised feed, and you can still be profiled and sold to advertisers because the bill as it stands says nothing about how paid content is ranked or targeted. Europe went further three years ago, barring personalised advertising to users aged 13 to 17. Australia’s draft doesn’t deal with that issue at all.
To be fair, this is difficult work, and the government is having a crack at US behemoths that until recently seemed untouchable. It threatens fines of up to $109.2 million, hefty unless you are Meta, which just settled US child safety claims for $25 billion.
And if the government’s plan works, it will be a paradigm shift, moving the obligation from cleaning up after harm to preventing it. It also extends beyond social media to games, apps and chatbots. Approved researchers and the eSafety commissioner will be able to use false identities to audit what children are served online. These are helpful moves.
The fix, in my eyes at least, is relatively straightforward. Flip the default for new accounts only, so a 16-year-old opening Instagram for the first time starts with the people they choose to follow, and has to ask for the algorithm if they want it. Ban profiling-based ads to under-18s, as Europe does.
Meta declined to comment on Wells’ announcement, but said there was no one single “algorithm” that could simply be switched off. The company argues that its ranking systems are useful for detecting abuse and demoting low-quality content, and points to Instagram’s “Following” and “Favourites” feeds, which already show posts chronologically.
The minister faces an uphill battle beyond the inevitable teeth gnashing from the tech giants. Opposition Leader Angus Taylor and One Nation have raised free-speech objections, though Wells’ opposite number, Sarah Henderson, says nothing should be off the table, including a permanent opt-out. The Greens want the algorithm off by default.
If Albanese and Wells get their way, you will be able to switch off the algorithm.
You just won’t be able to switch off what it already did.
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David Swan is the technology editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor for The Australian newspaper.Connect via X or email.
