Toxic algorithms wouldn't let them go - now Australia wants an off switch
BBC News
Australia wants apps to let users switch off recommended feeds. It’s a bid to break toxic loops that can drag people deeper into harm.
Based on reporting by BBC News — read the original for the full story.
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Australia has put a new kind of social media brake on the table: a switch that would turn off recommended content and leave people with posts from accounts they actually follow. The government introduced the plan to parliament this week as part of a broader push to rein in big tech and make online services safer.
The pitch is simple enough. If the feeds stop guessing what will keep you hooked, they may also stop pushing people toward content that makes them worse. That matters for people like Varsha Yajman, who says she still gets weight-loss material despite turning on every safety setting and blocking a long list of words. It also matters for Flynn Martin, who says recommendation systems helped pull him into the manosphere during a period of insecurity and poor mental health.
The proposal sits inside the Digital Duty of Care bill, which would apply to social media firms, gaming sites, chatbots and other online services. It would require them to take reasonable steps to keep users safe, protect children from harmful material and design features such as pornography and eating-disorder content, and protect adults from a narrower set of seriously harmful content and conduct. Breaches could bring fines of up to A$100m.
But the politics are messy. Big tech companies have largely stayed quiet in public, though Instagram boss Adam Mosseri argued that non-algorithmic feeds would make the app less useful and said the issue is not addiction in the clinical sense. Critics on the right in Australia and in the Trump administration say the plan could encourage over-moderation and censorship. Supporters counter that people would still be free to follow whoever they like, post what they want and even keep doomscrolling if that’s their hobby.
The harder problem may be execution. Australia is already struggling to enforce its social media ban for children, and the EU’s earlier attempt at algorithm controls ran into clunky user experience and low take-up. The Dutch are the outlier: a court there forced Meta to keep home-feed choice after finding it in breach of the EU’s Digital Services Act.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Australia is doing the rare thing: treating recommender systems like a product choice instead of a sacred law of nature. That alone is refreshing. Tech firms love calling every feed tweak “user experience” until someone asks why the defaults always seem to favor outrage and compulsion.
Read more about this at: BBC News