Australia is preparing legislation that would let people on social media choose whether they want to keep seeing algorithm-picked content at all or switch to a feed made up only of posts from accounts they actually follow.
The government has not released the exposure draft yet, and it is expected sometime this week, so much of the legal detail is still being worked out behind closed doors.
The idea sits inside a wider Digital Duty of Care framework that the government of Australia wants to legislate under the Online Safety Act 2021.
Rather than chasing individual pieces of harmful content after the fact, the approach asks platforms to take responsibility for how their systems and product design create risk in the first place.
That is a meaningful approach in how online safety regulation usually works, moving the burden upstream to the design choices platforms make rather than the posts users share.
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The mechanism reported so far is an opt-out rather than an opt-in. Users would keep seeing the algorithm by default, but the app would periodically prompt them with the choice to switch to a chronological, follows-only feed instead.
Communications Minister Anika Wells stated:
“Whether they want to keep the algorithm, whether they want to do things a different way, it should be their choice, not big tech’s choice.”
There is also a technical issue that has not been publicly resolved. Apps like Instagram use separate recommendation systems for the main feed, Stories, Reels, search, and notifications.
Lawmakers will therefore need to clarify whether “turning off the algorithm” would disable all of these systems or only one. It is also unclear whether ads would disappear when the algorithm is turned off, as the minister left that question to be addressed in the final draft.
Penalties for non-compliance could reportedly exceed AU$100 million, though the final structure depends on how the bill is written. The proposal is separate from Australia’s ongoing crackdown on under-16 social media use, and it applies to users generally rather than just minors.
