Australia is about to give its citizens a button that lets them tell TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook to take their algorithmic slop and shove it. The proposed Digital Duty of Care legislation, announced Tuesday by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, would require social media platforms to offer every user a genuine choice over what controls their feed. In America, we are still waiting for Congress to finish being bribed.
What Australia Is Actually Proposing
According to the Associated Press, platforms operating in Australia would be legally required to send a notification to both new and existing users asking them how they want their feed to work. Option one: let the algorithm do its thing, serving you a personalized drip-feed of content designed to keep your eyeballs glued to the screen until 2 AM. Option two: just see posts from the friends and creators you actually chose to follow, like it's 2009 and social media was still kind of fun.
This is not a minor tweak. The entire business model of every major social platform is built on the assumption that you will never be given a real choice about this, because if you were, a huge chunk of users would immediately turn the algorithm off. These companies know that. Which is why this law, if it passes, is going to cause genuine panic in Silicon Valley.
The proposed penalties are not symbolic either. Per the AP, platforms that fail to comply could be hit with fines of up to 109.2 million Australian dollars, which works out to roughly $78.6 million US. That's real money, even for Meta.
Kids Are the Specific Target Here
The algorithm opt-out is actually just one part of a broader package. The proposed legislation would also require digital services, including online games, apps, and AI chatbots, to protect children from design features engineered for addiction and self-esteem damage. The AP reports the bill specifically calls out content that promotes eating disorders, hostile ideas about women, pornography, dangerous stunts, and material that causes serious mental health distress.
This builds on something Australia already did last December, when it became the first country in the world to ban children under 16 from holding accounts on the major platforms at all. Instagram, Facebook, TikTok: if you're 15 or younger in Australia, you're legally locked out. The new proposal is the next layer of that, extending protections to the 16-and-over crowd who are technically allowed to be on these platforms but are still getting fed content designed to make them miserable.
In April, Australia's online safety regulator was reportedly considering court action against Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube for not doing enough to keep underage users off their platforms in the first place. So the government is not bluffing here. They are escalating.
Albanese Put It Pretty Plainly
"We'll require social media platforms to provide user empowerment tools that give people over the age of 16 genuine and enduring choice about what they see in their feeds," Albanese told reporters in Canberra Tuesday, per the AP. The phrase "genuine and enduring" is doing a lot of work there, and deliberately so. The worry with any opt-out system is that platforms will make it confusing, bury it in settings, and reset it every time they update their terms of service.
"It gives users choice and it will hold the big tech companies responsible for inaction," he added. That second part is the key. The law is not just asking platforms nicely. It is creating legal liability for platforms that drag their feet, with the fines to match.
Meanwhile, Somewhere Across the Pacific
The United States has been having a conversation about children's online safety for years now. Senators have held hearings. CEOs have been grilled. Mark Zuckerberg sat in front of Congress and apologized to parents of children who were harmed by his platforms, and then went back to running his platforms exactly the same way. Congress has not passed comprehensive federal kids' online safety legislation. Multiple attempts have stalled, been watered down, or quietly died.
The Trump administration, for its part, has been considerably more interested in fighting what it calls censorship of conservative viewpoints on social media than in actually regulating what the platforms do to users' brains. Tech companies spent enormous amounts of money lobbying against safety regulations and cozying up to the new administration. It worked. The regulatory appetite in Washington for going after Silicon Valley's core business practices is approximately zero right now.
So Australia is doing what Australia has been doing for the past couple of years: running an experiment in whether a democratic government can actually impose meaningful rules on the biggest technology companies in the world, rather than just holding press conferences about it.
What Happens If This Passes
The proposed legislation is still exactly that, proposed. It would need to pass through Australia's parliament before any of this becomes law. But Australia's track record on this particular issue suggests it is not just performative. The under-16 social media ban passed. The regulators are actively pursuing enforcement. This government has shown an unusual willingness to follow through.
If it does pass, every major platform will face a choice: build a genuine opt-out system for Australia, or pay fines until it hurts. Given that Meta's entire revenue model depends on algorithmic engagement driving ad targeting, a real opt-out option is a genuine business threat. The platforms will almost certainly spend a lot of money on lawyers before they spend a dollar actually building a user-friendly off switch.
Watch what they do. Their response will tell you everything about whether they think any government can actually force them to change.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe that social media algorithms are just neutral technology, just a helpful tool showing you content you might enjoy. They are not. They are precision instruments designed by some of the smartest engineers alive to override your judgment and keep you scrolling, and they work. We have about fifteen years of data on what they do to mental health, particularly in teenagers, and the companies that built them have seen that data and kept the algorithms running anyway because the engagement numbers were good.
Australia is not doing anything radical here. Offering users a real choice about their own feed is, if anything, a bare minimum. The radical thing is that no other major country has managed to make it happen yet, because these companies have proven extraordinarily good at turning their lobbying budgets into legislative paralysis. Australia keeps finding ways around that. The rest of the democratic world keeps watching and taking notes and then not doing anything.
The platforms will complain this is government overreach. That is the tell. When a company's first response to being asked to give users a genuine choice is to call it government overreach, they are admitting the choice would hurt them. Which tells you everything you need to know about why users deserve to have it.
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