Australia will make platforms ask users whether they want the algorithm

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Communications Minister Anika Wells released draft Digital Duty of Care legislation on Tuesday, 8 September, that would force social media platforms to show users a choice about their default feed. The scheme is branded My Feed, My Way. A notification would ask new and existing users whether they want personalised recommendations or a feed limited to accounts they already follow.

Users over 16 could opt in to the algorithm or opt out of it. Opting out would return the screen to something closer to an early-2010s follow list: friends, creators and groups the account holder chose. Albanese called the change sensible and practical. “If people want to doom scroll, that’s fine, that’s up to them,” he said. The political pitch is choice, not a ban. Australia already runs the world’s first social media age ban for children. This bill is the next instrument.

Failure to comply could cost a platform up to A$109.2 million. The eSafety commissioner would issue removal notices, demand documentation of harm-reduction measures, and check that those measures still work over time. The duty also reaches online games, apps and AI chatbots used by people under 18, with specific obligations on misogynistic content and eating-disorder material. Albanese is due to take the package to the United Nations General Assembly later this month.

The design has a known hole. Consent campaigner Chanel Contos has argued for nine months that an opt-out leaves the algorithm as the default and leaves intact the follow lists the algorithm already built. A Sydney Morning Herald trial last week gave a fake 17-year-old boy manosphere videos on TikTok within 13 minutes. If that boy then opts out, he still sees the 40 accounts the recommender taught him to follow. Contos wants the default reversed: chronological follows until a user asks for personalisation. The Greens take a similar line. The government’s draft does not.

The Coalition is split in public. Shadow communications minister Sarah Henderson has attacked recommender systems as psychological manipulation of children. Opposition leader Angus Taylor said he was deeply sceptical and feared a censorship bill. Shadow treasurer Tim Wilson raised the same objection about restricting opinion. That argument will shape the Senate. The age ban had newspaper support that this feed rule may not repeat.

Europe already gives users a right to turn off profiling under the Digital Services Act. Almost no regulator requires the platform to keep putting the question in front of the user. Australia’s draft does. The recurring prompt is the part that would change product design if it survives consultation and a parliamentary fight. A single buried toggle is what companies prefer. A pop-up that returns is what Canberra is trying to write into law.

Consultation on the exposure draft is targeted, not open-ended. Platforms will argue that a follow-only feed is easy to game, that creators will lose reach, and that the penalty is sized for a banking fine rather than a product setting. Wells’s answer is the duty itself: document the risk, fix it, and keep the fix current. Whether eSafety can audit a recommender without sitting inside the company is the enforcement problem the draft does not solve on paper.

The information gain in the bill is not the slogan. It is the combination of a mandated prompt, a dollar figure attached to ignoring it, and a regulator that already has removal powers from the age-ban fight. If the prompt becomes law, every large platform that serves Australians over 16 will have to ship a second feed and prove it is the one the user picked. That is a product change, not a press release. The consultation will show how hard the companies intend to resist it.