Australia’s New Feed Opt-Out: What You Need to Know

The Albanese government released the draft legislation Tuesday in Canberra, part of a broader package it’s calling the Digital Duty of Care. The mechanism inside it, “My Feed, My Way,” is simple to describe: platforms would have to notify users and let them choose. Opt in, and the algorithm keeps recommending. Opt out, and the feed narrows to accounts the user has chosen to follow. The government’s release does not specify that the opt-out feed will run chronologically — that request is coming from advocates and outside critics, not from the draft text itself. (Source: the Prime Minister’s official release)

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese framed it as a return of control, not an expansion of it. “This is not about giving government control, it is about giving people control,” he told reporters in Canberra. In a separate statement, he described the goal as giving “people over the age of 16 genuine and enduring choice about what they see in their feeds.” It’s language his government has used before — Australia already passed world-first minimum-age restrictions barring under-16s from holding accounts on designated large social platforms, including Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. (SBS News; AP)

The duty of care itself reaches further than feeds. Digital services — social platforms, but also online games, apps and AI chatbots — would be required to protect people under 18 from design features carrying negative behavioral impacts, and from content that promotes eating disorders, hostile ideas about women, pornography, crime, dangerous stunts or serious mental health distress. The draft would also let the government issue removal notices for “nudify” apps and sites that use AI to generate fake nude images without consent — sharing that content is already illegal in much of Australia, but building the tools to do it isn’t. “My Feed, My Way” is the most visible piece of that package. It is not the whole bill. (SBS News; AP)

What “My Feed, My Way” Actually Changes

The early coverage mostly stopped at the mechanics: opt in, opt out, a penalty ceiling attached to the broader duty of care. That’s accurate, and it’s also the easy version of the story. The harder version sits one layer down — this is a child-safety proposal that happens to use the feed as one of its levers, still in draft form and open for consultation, with formal introduction to Parliament expected later this year.

Failure to meet the duty of care could attract penalties of up to A$109.2 million (about US$78.6 million). That figure applies to the broader duty of care obligation, not automatically to any single missing feature like the feed toggle — the government has not said a platform that ships every other requirement but stumbles on one detail faces the maximum fine. This isn’t the government’s first move against these platforms this year: in April, Australia’s online safety watchdog said it was considering court action against Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube over child-safety compliance, well before this draft existed. (AP)

Here is KMOB1003’s analysis, clearly marked as our read rather than the government’s stated rationale: strip the algorithm’s recommendation layer away from a feed, even as an opt-in choice, and you’ve created a vacuum. Somebody or something still has to decide what a person following three hundred accounts sees first. Whether that feed ends up chronological, as one academic told SBS it would need to be to actually work — “if this is simply the option to go to a recommender-driven feed that is not based on you, then I think the change is probably pointless and may in fact make it worse” — is exactly the detail still unresolved in a draft proposal, not a settled feature. (SBS News)

The proposal is already contested inside Australia. Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young has put forward her own bill calling for the algorithm opt-out to be the default setting, not an opt-in choice, and the Greens have said they’re withholding a position until they see the actual draft text. Opposition leader Angus Taylor has said he’s “deeply sceptical” the plan isn’t really about controlling what people see, while arguing parents should have more say over what their kids can view. Communications Minister Anika Wells has pushed back on that framing directly: “The digital duty of care is not about controlling adults online. It is about giving adults a choice,” adding, “there is a global reckoning coming for big tech.” (SBS News)

For the person holding the phone, the practical shift — if this draft becomes law roughly as written, and if the opt-out feed ends up doing what advocates are asking for — is smaller than the political fight around it: a notification, a choice, and a feed built from the people you follow instead of what a recommendation engine thinks you might also like.

That’s also, not coincidentally, exactly the space human curation has always lived in: the friend who sends you a song before it’s anywhere near your feed, the creator whose taste you trust more than a recommendation model’s guess, the publication that tells you what actually matters instead of what performed well last week. A proposal that hands the choice back to the user doesn’t eliminate the need for that kind of guide. It makes the case for one easier to explain — it doesn’t validate it by government decree.

For operators and creators watching this rather than just scrolling through it, the practical takeaway is about audience-building, not policy commentary: a follows-only feed could place more weight on the accounts people have deliberately chosen, which means the decision to follow becomes worth more than it used to be. Algorithmic reach can still surface a creator once, on someone else’s terms. Being someone’s deliberate follow is a different kind of asset — harder to win, and less exposed to the next platform redesign.