Australia’s algorithm opt-out is a fight for freedom of choice

Australia’s proposed algorithm opt-out would give social media users greater control over what they see, without restricting what anyone can say. Wayne Hawkins writes.

THERE WAS A TIME, not that long ago, when opening a social media app meant seeing what your friends actually posted, in the order they posted it.

You followed people, they showed up, you scrolled to the end and that was that. Simple. Predictable. Yours.

That world is gone, replaced by engagement-optimised feeds engineered to keep you scrolling as long as possible. Now, a growing chorus of Australian politicians – crossing party lines – is asking the Government to hand that control back, backed by the Fix Our Feeds campaign led by Chanel Contos, and a cross-bench joint statement from senators and MPs on Internet Safety Day 2026.

The proposal is simple: let Australians opt out of algorithmic feeds altogether, or better, make algorithms opt-in rather than the automatic default.

It's a good idea. Here's why.

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It's not new, it's a return

Critics of reform often frame algorithmic feeds as an inevitable feature of modern technology — something we simply have to live with. That's not true. Chronological, follow-based feeds are how Facebook, Instagram and Twitter/X worked for most of their existence, before engagement-ranking systems took over from around 2016 onward.

Nobody is being asked to imagine an untested alternative. They're being offered the return of something that already worked, for years, at scale.

The harm isn't hypothetical

The case for reform started with a specific, ugly statistic: reporting citing Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek found that boys as young as 13 are being fed misogynistic, violent content within roughly 20 minutes of setting up a social media account, regardless of what they actually search for or follow.

That's not incidental. It's the algorithm doing exactly what it was built to do — find whatever provokes the strongest reaction and serve more of it, because outrage keeps people on the app.

The same pattern shows up well beyond misogyny. A field experiment re-ranking political content on X found that increasing people's exposure to hostile, antidemocratic content within their feeds measurably shifted their political attitudes over just ten days.

Separate research into anti-migration narratives found that even when people privately held moderate views, platform dynamics amplified support for the most hostile version of the argument on offer.

The mechanism isn't ideological. It rewards whatever generates a fast emotional response and moves public conversation toward extremes as a side effect.

It would be a mistake, though, to assume this only works on people who don't think critically. It doesn't. Confirmation bias and emotional reactivity affect thoughtful, educated people, too — arguably more, in some cases, because they're better equipped to build a sophisticated justification for a reaction the algorithm already provoked before reasoning kicked in.

The algorithm isn't exploiting a deficit in intelligence. It's exploiting the universal gap between an emotional response and the slower work of thinking it through.

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Learning from a bill that failed

Australia already tried to tackle this problem once from a different angle and it collapsed. The 2024 Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill would have empowered the media regulator to fine platforms for failing to curb harmful misinformation.

The bill was withdrawn in November 2024 after the Government concluded there was no pathway through the Senate, following free speech concerns from across the political spectrum. Critics, fairly, didn't want a regulator deciding what counted as truth.

The algorithm opt-out sidesteps that entire fight. It doesn't require anyone to define misinformation or adjudicate what's true. It doesn't touch content at all. It simply removes the amplification engine that decides what gets pushed in front of you and lets you decide. That's a meaningfully different and much more defensible kind of reform.

It's also worth being precise about language here. This isn't a free speech issue — nobody's expression is being restricted. It's a freedom of choice issue. Right now, the choice about how you consume information is made for you the moment you open the app. An opt-out hands that decision back to the individual, without anyone needing to police what anyone else says.

It might bring people back, not drive them away

There's a reasonable objection that an opt-out is just another regulatory headache platforms will resist. Fair — and they will, because engagement-optimised feeds are directly tied to ad revenue. But it's worth noting the reform could cut the other way for user numbers.

A recent study of 1,000 social media users found people are quietly disengaging from these platforms, becoming lurkers rather than participants, posting less, and in some cases leaving outright, citing polarisation and mental health as reasons. Younger users are pulling back the hardest.

Separately, a large-scale field experiment that moved consenting Facebook and Instagram users onto chronological feeds during the 2020 U.S. Election found it substantially reduced the time they spent on the platforms — evidence that algorithmic feeds really are the more addictive design, not simply a more useful one.

Put those two findings together and a genuine possibility emerges: giving people the choice to switch the algorithm off might actually win back some of the users who left because they couldn't stand what the algorithm was doing to them in the first place.

That's worth remembering next time someone claims this reform is anti-innovation or bad for the platforms. It might just be good business, dressed up as good policy — and for once, that's not a bad thing.