Australia is proposing to let people switch off recommended social media content and see posts only from accounts they follow. The proposal is part of a wider Digital Duty of Care bill that would require online services to take reasonable steps to provide a safer environment.
Watch Desk analysis
What happened
The BBC reports that the reforms were introduced to Australia’s parliament this week. The proposed feed switch would have to be easy to find, no less functional than the algorithmic option, and stay off when someone leaves and returns to an app unless they explicitly choose otherwise.
The bill would cover social media, gaming sites, chatbots and other online services. It proposes protections against harmful material and design features for children, and a narrower category of seriously harmful material and conduct for adults. Breaches could attract fines of up to A$100 million.
Why it matters
This is more than a choice between a chronological feed and one tuned to keep people scrolling. Australia is proposing both a user-facing control and a broader duty on services, shifting some responsibility for online safety from users to the companies operating the platforms.
The details matter. The BBC describes existing feed controls that can come with reduced functionality or revert when users leave an app. Australia’s proposal would try to prevent those design choices from making the non-algorithmic option a switch in name only.
Our read
A setting is only a choice if people can find it, use the service properly afterwards, and trust it to stay put. Those are sensible tests. But a rule on paper still has to survive contact with platforms that can make compliance awkward, and with a government that must decide what counts as reasonable protection without overreaching.
What to watch
- Whether the bill passes and how its duties are defined in the final text.
- How regulators will judge whether a following-only feed is genuinely usable.
- Whether platforms comply in practice, and how enforcement works if they do not.
Discussion spark: Should Australia require platforms to make non-algorithmic feeds a fully usable, persistent choice, even if that means government sets design rules for private services?
Sources and evidence
- Social media algorithms: What if you could turn them off? – BBC (16 October 2026, 18:11 UTC)
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