The damage is already done for most people who already use it. Whenever I go to a restaurant and see friends, families, and couples together, I feel sad that instead of talking to each other, they’re all watching TikToks or reels. On a bus or train, barely one or two people are actually doing something other than watching something online.
At least, hopefully, this rule helps future generations. People’s brains are so addicted that they can’t even focus for 10 minutes straight. On top of that, I see moms giving their toddlers mobile phones while they eat or whenever they need to get something done. People should really start considering how social media affects us in the long term.
Believe it or not many people actually read news and books on their phones.
I think there a lot of survivorship bias in this observation, where the thing you’re most likely to see people watching is the thing that’s most flashy.
Yes and public transport isn't exactly a great environment for interacting with your friends - either its already loud or you're going to annoy other passengers.
Read, knitting/crochet, sleep, listen to music, play games (eg. emulator + pokemon games), study, read a newspaper, do crosswords, play chess online, watch a movie, listen to a podcast, learn a language, talk to other non-scrolling people, and yes, you can also stare outside, daydream or self-analyze, or even do nothing. Just a few decades ago we had a lot of dead times, it's not that crazy to pass an hour without having anything to do.
A lot of those suggestions mean staring at a phone or smilar device and a bystander like ggp might not be able to tell them apart from looking at social media.
I read but on my phone or ebook reader and have done so for nearly 20 years. Especially since mass market paperbacks were replaced by larger ones that do not fit in my pocket or bookshelves.
I am in England – It is considered very odd to talk to strangers on a train or bus
Thinking. Taking notes, ideally on a piece of paper. Relaxing. Talking to strangers. And yes, self-analysing. Staring in the window, maybe not so much.
I treasure my memories of being on subways and busses and getting lost in thought while staring out the windows, yeah. I mean, people have done this for basically all of human history (okay walking or something, not on a train, but, yeah). It's not a bad thing to have some time with just your senses existing in the world.
Do you really enjoy doom scrolling? Because I don't, it is just addictive and makes me feel tired and sad most of the times, with infrequent sparks of joy.
The problem with being always online is not “not-enjoying” but stopping to think. People are getting used to be feed what they need to think constantly (from politics to product reviews) and then their critical thinking skills atrophy.
Moreover, I’m not sure if being on social media is something “enjoyable” anymore, and it’s more like smoking tobacco where it becomes necessary but is not enjoyed.
Do people really ignore family and do completely separate things on their devices right next to each other?? Usually when I'm next to someone, I'm using my device to look up things related to the conversation, just like how I'd use a search engine during an internet discussion. I can't imagine just sitting around watching shorts right next to someone during a family gathering.
There isn't any need to "look things up related to the conversation", and if that is seen as acceptable then that itself is a sign of how things have changed, and how addicted we all are to information.
I dunno, to me it feels kind of like pulling a book off the shelf to double-check something from there. It's just, you know, digital instead. It's definitely something that's been acceptable to some kinds of people even before devices, but of course it's not for everybody. Some people prefer to say "I'm not sure", leave the conversation, and then come back later (or not) after they've studied up. Some people prefer not to have their conversational partners dwelling on details by digging into books during conversation. I personally like to get to the bottom of details on the spot, but that's probably my ADHD. (potentially also other things too)
Why do people (or at least politicians pretend to) believe that social networks are popular despite the content algos and not because of them? The reason Tik Tok blew up is because it shows you what you want to see without you twiddling with a dozen dials.
Maybe giving people what they want is not great for them. I am ok with this argument. But then "giving people control" won't change anything. Vast majority of users would rather put up with shocking (to me) levels of annoyance and expense just not to configure/fix anything themselves.
They don't. They want to let people opt out of social media feeds for the same reason they currently let gamblers self-exclude[0].
Politicians do not believe that casinos are popular despite the gambling and they do not believe that social media is popular despite the feed. They want to protect the general public from addiction.
It's all fun and games when you download Tiktok. Then one day you're scrolling while your kid is in the pool, the lifeguard jumps in to save her, you realise you would have let your daughter die because you're addicted to watching dance videos on the fent rectangle, and you decide to quit.
Before it was social “media” Facebook was a great way to see friends & families updates in a chronological way with very little clutter. Then people began soapboxing, then came the ads, then all the random “interests” they assign to you and it’s completely useless now.
TikTok, IG etc are a little different as they’re actually media streams but I wanted to say that about Facebook - give me what I want on Facebook and it would be a wonderful service.
I cannot relate to liking Facebook because I never did in any of its eras but once upon a time newspaper was a competitive information technology. People would read them on the subway and at the beach. I did this, I am old enough to remember "saving" articles to read when I took a magazine into the sauna.
The same happened to algo-less social media sites.
Even if someone was crazy about facebook, there was a limited amount of content they could see from my friends, you'd be done watching everything in 10 minutes. The levels of addiction we see today on TikTok, IG, etc were not even possible.
Social media and other such things were gaining explosively popularity (and addiction) long before 'the algorithm' was even a thought. Even in the pre-social media age, newsgroups and other such social venues had a similar effect, but relatively low reach because it wasn't mainstream and there were some significant barriers to getting started.
I'd look at trends as well. There is a time when Facebook was hot and trendy, whereas now it's a place for people's parents and grandparents - while all the cool kids are on Instagram. I think it's safe to say that the shift there was more social than technological. Younger generations wanted their own thing.
And I'd see TikTok as being in the same vein there, especially as YouTube has gradually shifted away from being YouTube and more like CorpoTube. But there weren't any especially viable stateside competitors. The few that did exist basically just tried to be YouTube, but with less content and worse CDN networks.
Sure, there’s an argument for improving the default too. I was just replying to what I thought was someone saying “it doesn’t matter, most people won’t use it, give up”
Fair enough. I legitimately hate people who do that - gaslighting people into not wanting change. I don't even understand what drives that mentality half the time.
I was a teenage boy in the 90s and "girls are stupid" is definitely not a Tik Tok original. Yeah, yeah, scale matters but this is not in fact the first generation to discover sex differences or vices.
You are massively underrepresenting the situation. This is not “girls have cooties”, this is full-on women bashing. This is calling all women subhuman whores who don’t deserve respect. For crying out loud, there are massive “influencers” out there whose whole job is to degrade women online. You might’ve heard of a couple of wildly popular brothers who have just been arrested for literal human trafficking who forced women to be cam girls while making money publicly bragging about it, and those guys are (again, publicly) connected to the president of the USA.
Let’s please not pretend this is even comparable to the 90s. Scale is a quality of its own, and the scale of the current situation, both in severity and reach, is very different.
Yeah, it has gone further. You wouldn't hear "kill all men" at a uni in the 90s either. But I am not convinced that this is social media because hardline feminism predates it significantly.
But could it be that formerly unrealistic levels of exposure has normalised these things that always existed, and now they are mainstream and affecting kids __due to social media__ ?
Every social media is popular because of the network effect. Even TikTok launched just under a decade ago, grew with help from China’s government and cultural isolation, and only became “mainstream” (in 2020) after already having hundreds of millions of users including celebrities like Justin Bieber.
These algorithms can be incredibly predatory towards people who engage with content they don't want to see, because they're optimizing for engagement, not enjoyment.
Engagement does not correlate with want. I know people who hated every second of their time on TikTok because it kept showing them only the most awful and traumatic shit, but for the same reason, they couldn't just leave because the reason it was traumatic was because they felt terribly guilty to leave it alone. They were shown all sorts of threats about how terrible of a person they'd be if they didn't like, share, comment, etc. and they were scared out of their mind into having to do it, and that only taught the algorithm to show them more -- to seek out only the worst, most horrible and awful and traumatic content to show them because that scared them the most and compelled them the most. It's awful, horrible, sure they shouldn't have been on TikTok at all (no one should), but it shouldn't have done that to them either
The first social networks were actually social (ie relating to friends), algos came later, to better exploit attention for ads.
When twitter changed its feeds it had to force people into the new style feed by giving them a choice but wiping their choice every time they opened the app and forcing the algorithmic slop feed.
This is long overdue and I hope all countries adopt it. It should be the default and if people want to consume slop they will always have a choice to do so.
I came here expecting an apologia for the manipulative feeds of big tech, and found one at the top. If that’s not what you intended, perhaps consider that you’re acting as a useful idiot for them.
> Why do people (or at least politicians pretend to) believe that cigarettes are popular despite the content nicotine and not because of them? The reason Malboro blew up is because it gives you a surge of dopamine without having to do anything for it.
Yes - TikTok is popular, precicely because the algorithmic feeds are designed to be addictive. They show content, not because its good, not because its what you ask for, but because its exactly what will keep your eyes glued to the screen.
I would assume that the majority of users would prefer a Facebook experience that showed them just the friends and family they follow, and nothing else.
Most of my crowd seem to have left them behind because they went from a tool where I could see what my people were up to, and maybe the odd update about a band or a business I was interested in, to "Here are 50 things you have no interest in and by the way I deprioritised what your actual friends post".
This happened so much that most of the actual friends wandered off, making those posts even rarer. There seems to be a de-networking effect.
Should government be legislating that social networks work the way I want? Very good question, probably not. Am I still happy with this change? Broadly yes.
> Just as we have basic safety standards for cars, toys or food, the duty of care applies basic standards for the online products we use every day.
Aussie here. Great to see this. I don't think this goes far enough: I'd like to see addictive algorithms, content, and doomscrolling banned entirely. Not an option to see a different feed. Illegal. It's manipulative, hurts people, hurts children: make it illegal.
Please don't start randomly prohibiting things because you dis-approve of those things.
We have, at this point, over a 100 years of evidence showing that prohibition of psychoactive substances (alcohol, cannabis, cocaine, etc) doesn't actually do much to reduce consumption but do create an immense amount of suffering not just for anyone participating in the trade or consumption of those substances, but also anyone remotely connected to them - cf the immense violence perpetrated by drug cartels in the Americas, mostly because people living in the US seem to be in denial about their appetite for drugs.
So please, stop banning things you don't like, tax and regulate them instead. Use the tax proceeds to fund "social media rehab" clinics if you'd like.
Draconian "I don't like it, it gets banned" government wasn't a good idea in 15th century Spain, it's still not a good idea now. Let your fellow citizens make bad decisions, just ensure that the government is poised to profit from them.
I’d prefer similar to Doctorow, that governments simply make scraping and republishing (anything that anyone who consents can access) explicitly legal, then alternate frontends may appear with their own algorithms.
Red herring, you've linked to a conservative leaning sub community posting a source that is known to be generally inaccurate.
This is about legislation penalizing social media companies for shoving algorithmic slop down the throats of consumers.
But if we want to introduce political figures and their thoughts on social media; the traditional opposition party is lead by this man - someone willing to manipulate the public with social media.
I'll give you a hint though - the article doesn't even quote him, it just puts out a spicy headline.
What he actually said and the context:
"Ban social media. Keyboard warriors can anonymously say anything at all. Without any fear.", with regard to a misinformation bill.
Considering the sources deliberately stripped everything of context and you've repeated it without checking, would you say we have a misinformation problem with media in general, or social media?
It's unclear whether this legislation will require giving users the choice of the sort order. That's one of the tricks exploitative social networks use, selective prioritization of ragebait and other content that encourages "engagement". If you have the choice of strict chronological order, that removes a lot of the hold the networks have over you.
I don't think this goes nearly far enough, and is another example of our government latching onto a juicy trending topic and doing the bare minimum to make a positive sounding news byte out of. This should be an opt-in model for algorithmically driven content, infinite scrolling, etc. An opt out model just feels like they're compromising for the benefit of industry lobbyists on the issue.
> another example of our government latching onto a juicy trending topic and doing the bare minimum
Say it ain't so!
For those not following Australian politics, this is the theme of our times. Find a big issue that people want something done about, half-arse it and bow to corporate interests instead of taking decisive action. The big one recently has been gambling advertising. The government commissioned a report that came to the well-argued conclusion that, as the biggest gamblers in the world per capita, Australia really should ban gambling advertising. It's pervasive, offensive and way too normalised.
There appeared to be cross party support for the proposal, and widespread public support. Easy win for the party in power.
The current government sat on it for a couple of years and then came back with a watered down proposal to cap the amount it could be on tv and try to restrict it during times kids might be watching. Way to miss an open goal Albo.
The whole political charade is just getting me so angry, the thin veil of "government working for the people" rhetoric has completely fallen away to expose how directly corporate interests translate into Australian government policy.
Majority of Australians supported changes in how the resource sector is taxed - the government openly met with industry lobbyists right before the budget and just said lol no.
They went to a local byelection and their candidate was a gas lobbyist they parachuted in from a different electorate.
The gambling thing, what a joke.
The social media ban for kids that immediately turned out to be pushed by pro media lobbyists.
The military spending. My word.
They don't even try to hide it anymore, and Labor were meant to be the quasi-progressive-left option in the uniparty system. Now I view them to be equally as corrupt as the Liberal party, leaving the Greens as the only viable option in politics here. And they can never get anywhere due to the way political donations/funding is set up, along with the vested interests owning the media narrative. No one even bothers to read their policy documents because old Rupert Murdoch has their opinion covered for them.
>Majority of Australians supported changes in how the resource sector is taxed - the government openly met with industry lobbyists right before the budget and just said lol no.
The government consulted with key stakeholders before the budget? Say it ain't so! The lobbyists in question will be people with a Government Relations role, their whole job is to be the middlemen between the corporation and the government.
The main argument was calling for gas to be taxed more. This completely ignores reality of most gas being under contract until at least 2030, the government could not increase tax on this resource without breaking contracts. Hardly a wise decision. While they could increase it for future contracts, is this really the correct choice? We're trying to transition away from gas and other fossil fuels, why would we instead tie our tax revenue even closer to these resources?
>They went to a local byelection and their candidate was a gas lobbyist they parachuted in from a different electorate.
Yep, pretty tone-deaf. Not really the fault of the federal Labor govt however, this was just a classic WA Labor move, the state most beholden to these interests.
I agree with your other points. Military spending is screwed for either party, we're beholden to the US in this case.
The USA has a choice between two parties - democrat or republican. China only has one party, Russian has (in principle) one party and North Korea only has one dictator.
So if these places got a second party or dictator, it would be a 50% improvement.
The war on drugs was a failure, and the most successful cases (other than harsh punishments while avoiding massive drug use in the first place, like Singapore) involve legalization.
> with draft legislation for the Digital Duty of Care released today for targeted consultation.
I hope it won’t be “community consultation” like they did with the AABill… that time where the Australian government ignored everyone in the community except for a handful of lobby groups. You know… that time where people filed FOI Requests about the AABill and not a single request was responded to.
Forget politics people… you all have zero sway. The laws have already been written by The Inner Party, and they’re just drip feeding them to us over time so that we don’t notice the sudden shifting of the Overton Window to serfdom
Wouldn't the better way be is to make social media open? i.e. anyone can generate their own algorithm or chose from others who created them. I see that the social media companies could implement these requirements in the worse possible way to ensure that they opt right back in to "choose to opt in to having their default feed include personalised content recommended by the algorithm"
I talked about this in my blog post [1]. I didn't expect regulators to pay attention to the issue anytime soon—let alone move against it. So kudos to the Australian government. Enough with the free-speech and free-market rhetoric: algorithmic feeds are actively poisoning our minds and should be regulated as strictly as possible.
> The issue is that much of the problematic content doesn’t violate any law but still is poison that shouldn’t be on anyone’s feed. The easiest example is painting feminism as some evil propaganda against men, and how women’s place in the kitchen is natural order of things. Such views have gained steam in the recent times purely because of social media (algorithms).
> The ideal regulation would be to ban or heavily regulate algorithmic feeds. If you don’t follow someone, or a page, or an interest, there’s no reason for you to get that stuff on your timeline. Only things that should be shown is what you explicitly choose. And if it does, it should be easy enough to nuke it from your timeline.
Thats part of the premise, we don't need to invent new technologies when email/rss are already self curated / federated.
The missing piece is discovery.
Which is why in addition to allowing you to aggregate internal/external feeds into one place, each instance also shares each external feed its users have subscribed too, and each user can share who they read (like a blog roll).
I deleted all of my history and "paused" history tracking. Then I reloaded https://www.youtube.com.
My expectation: A feed of the pages I'm subscribed to.
My experience: A blank page which just says "Your watch history is off / You can change your setting at any time to get the latest videos tailored to you. [Learn more] / [Update Settings]".
Hilariously, it is exactly the same - in glorious 4K - on the YouTube app on my TV.
This is deliberately fucked in order force users into the algorithm.
> You can already do this on youtube by not allowing history.
And what a bliss that is! I love it how YouTube thinks it’s punishing me by turning off the home page recommendations if you disable history (it didn’t always do that) while it’s in fact a favour. In my country (and I assume most/every country), the default home feed is such a cesspool of vomit-inducing clickbait garbage that it boils my blood to even glance at it.
> That's great however after seeing their feed being empty people will switch back.
But yes, I have no illusion that everyone shares my aversion. Removing control from the companies will hopefully have some impact, though.
This reminds me of the YouTube creator Technology Connections trying to engage with people on bluesky, which already provides feed customization and even lets you write code to build your own feed algorithms. He loosely coined the term "algorithmic complacency" to explain how users didn't like bluesky specifically because they had to explicitly choose who or what they wanted to follow, his fear being that especially young people would rather be served slop than decide for themselves what content they want to see.
Maybe he's right, but there are way more issues with Bluesky that affect user retention. For example the app seems to love logging users out if they have intermittent Internet or are using a VPN, or just because the app feels like it. It's an insane bug or security stance.
Meanwhile, Setlog is gaining popularity in east Asia, which definitely indicates there is some demand for friend-only social media. I think many Discord users are basically using Discord like that too. Giving users the choice is the right move.
"The Albanese Government is taking the next step following its world leading social media age ban to ensure Australians have more choice online...." - Me thinking "What the heck? What Albanese government has to do with Australians? Are they under the occupation? Albanian occupation?!"
The feed options sound good in principle, although I expect the implementation to be deliberately hobbled. I've tried Facebook's existing (well hidden) chronological feed and it turns out there's so much spam in local groups that I found it unusable.
The bigger issue is the toxic "papers please" identity verification will result in a lot fewer "Australians" on the internet, who will now show up from various VPN endpoint countries, so presumably won't get the algorithm option.
4chan doesn't use any manipulative algorithms and all its feeds are time based, just saying.
Oddly, 4chan is also the only place where 2 extremely opposed sides can and regularly do interact and debate - even if a large proportion of that traffic is bot farms.
> Users can choose to opt in to having their default feed include personalised content recommended by the algorithm. Alternatively, users can opt out of personally recommended content in their default feed and see the friends and creators they choose to follow.
Does that mean they are giving platforms the choice of what’s going to be the default? That doesn’t seem like a wise plan.
I think this is a nice idea, but three koala dollars says that in a year we find out most Australians switched back to the dopamine feed after a day or two. Nice to have the choice, though.
This is going to get about 0% uptake. People's preferences, as revealed by their behavior, align with the algorithmic feeds. That's the whole point of an algorithmic feed.
With Facebook, people reported not being able to see their spouses' posts. They were "Married" on Facebook, but the feed just shoved things into their faces they didn't want. It would even edit posts when you went to their pages (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719)
Interesting scenarios that could happen in next few years
* American internet companies start to make the judgement that supporting EU/ANZ countries with difficult legal/tax requirements is a net cost and stop doing it, just IP-blocking those countries for the lowest legal risk
* Alternatively, American govt takes the position of "American companies don't have to follow the laws of random countries just because they accept IP packets from those countries". American companies eliminate their official business presence in onerous legal regimes but keep serving users there
* If above happens, this forces the resolution of the question "how does internet jurisdiction work across borders if USA doesn't play along", and a plausible answer is that internet messages start to be treated like physical imports and nation-level internet censorship moves under the purview of customs agencies
The globally routable internet is a very special and valuable thing, but it's a historical aberration and I suspect not very stable long-term. Even today, with the internet way more locked down than 20 years ago, it's still extremely libertarian compared to almost any other economically significant venue. In equilibrium, the state will demand its cut
> * Alternatively, American govt takes the position of "American companies don't have to follow the laws of random countries just because they accept IP packets from those countries". American companies eliminate their official business presence in onerous legal regimes but keep serving users there
Why would they do that? If they can't have a local business presence then they can't book local advertisers.
Which directly cuts any revenue they would get from the enterprise.
None of these companies need to have local business presences: they do because otherwise you can't get revenue from users in that nationality.
> American internet companies start to make the judgement that supporting EU/ANZ countries with difficult legal/tax requirements is a net cost and stop doing it, just IP-blocking those countries for the lowest legal risk
Productivity spikes, youth mental health issues trend downwards and the nutcase right-wing parties struggle to maintain momentum.
The damage is already done for most people who already use it. Whenever I go to a restaurant and see friends, families, and couples together, I feel sad that instead of talking to each other, they’re all watching TikToks or reels. On a bus or train, barely one or two people are actually doing something other than watching something online.
At least, hopefully, this rule helps future generations. People’s brains are so addicted that they can’t even focus for 10 minutes straight. On top of that, I see moms giving their toddlers mobile phones while they eat or whenever they need to get something done. People should really start considering how social media affects us in the long term.
Believe it or not many people actually read news and books on their phones.
I think there a lot of survivorship bias in this observation, where the thing you’re most likely to see people watching is the thing that’s most flashy.
Yes and public transport isn't exactly a great environment for interacting with your friends - either its already loud or you're going to annoy other passengers.
> On a bus or train, barely one or two people are actually doing something other than watching something online.
I mean, what else should I be doing? Self-analyzing and staring in the window?
Read, knitting/crochet, sleep, listen to music, play games (eg. emulator + pokemon games), study, read a newspaper, do crosswords, play chess online, watch a movie, listen to a podcast, learn a language, talk to other non-scrolling people, and yes, you can also stare outside, daydream or self-analyze, or even do nothing. Just a few decades ago we had a lot of dead times, it's not that crazy to pass an hour without having anything to do.
A lot of those suggestions mean staring at a phone or smilar device and a bystander like ggp might not be able to tell them apart from looking at social media.
Reading and conversing with a stranger? Maybe not every time but at least once in a while?
I read but on my phone or ebook reader and have done so for nearly 20 years. Especially since mass market paperbacks were replaced by larger ones that do not fit in my pocket or bookshelves.
I am in England – It is considered very odd to talk to strangers on a train or bus
Thinking. Taking notes, ideally on a piece of paper. Relaxing. Talking to strangers. And yes, self-analysing. Staring in the window, maybe not so much.
I treasure my memories of being on subways and busses and getting lost in thought while staring out the windows, yeah. I mean, people have done this for basically all of human history (okay walking or something, not on a train, but, yeah). It's not a bad thing to have some time with just your senses existing in the world.
I mean, you're right. When I travel, I rarely use my phone or listen to music because everything is about discovering new things, and I love it
But when I'm home, on my way from home to the gym, I take the same route every day, and it can get boring sometimes
I'm also terrible at keeping my phone charged, so sometimes I end up alone with my thoughts anyway
Let people enjoy things.
Do you really enjoy doom scrolling? Because I don't, it is just addictive and makes me feel tired and sad most of the times, with infrequent sparks of joy.
Don’t do things you don’t enjoy.
They are really adictive and engaging, and they trick you into spending more time there. Nobody ever says "let's watch reels for 3h", but here we are.
The problem with being always online is not “not-enjoying” but stopping to think. People are getting used to be feed what they need to think constantly (from politics to product reviews) and then their critical thinking skills atrophy.
Moreover, I’m not sure if being on social media is something “enjoyable” anymore, and it’s more like smoking tobacco where it becomes necessary but is not enjoyed.
its ok to just be bored. that was life in the 90s for me
Do people really ignore family and do completely separate things on their devices right next to each other?? Usually when I'm next to someone, I'm using my device to look up things related to the conversation, just like how I'd use a search engine during an internet discussion. I can't imagine just sitting around watching shorts right next to someone during a family gathering.
There isn't any need to "look things up related to the conversation", and if that is seen as acceptable then that itself is a sign of how things have changed, and how addicted we all are to information.
I dunno, to me it feels kind of like pulling a book off the shelf to double-check something from there. It's just, you know, digital instead. It's definitely something that's been acceptable to some kinds of people even before devices, but of course it's not for everybody. Some people prefer to say "I'm not sure", leave the conversation, and then come back later (or not) after they've studied up. Some people prefer not to have their conversational partners dwelling on details by digging into books during conversation. I personally like to get to the bottom of details on the spot, but that's probably my ADHD. (potentially also other things too)
Why do people (or at least politicians pretend to) believe that social networks are popular despite the content algos and not because of them? The reason Tik Tok blew up is because it shows you what you want to see without you twiddling with a dozen dials.
Maybe giving people what they want is not great for them. I am ok with this argument. But then "giving people control" won't change anything. Vast majority of users would rather put up with shocking (to me) levels of annoyance and expense just not to configure/fix anything themselves.
They don't. They want to let people opt out of social media feeds for the same reason they currently let gamblers self-exclude[0].
Politicians do not believe that casinos are popular despite the gambling and they do not believe that social media is popular despite the feed. They want to protect the general public from addiction.
It's all fun and games when you download Tiktok. Then one day you're scrolling while your kid is in the pool, the lifeguard jumps in to save her, you realise you would have let your daughter die because you're addicted to watching dance videos on the fent rectangle, and you decide to quit.
[0] https://www.betstop.gov.au/
Before it was social “media” Facebook was a great way to see friends & families updates in a chronological way with very little clutter. Then people began soapboxing, then came the ads, then all the random “interests” they assign to you and it’s completely useless now.
TikTok, IG etc are a little different as they’re actually media streams but I wanted to say that about Facebook - give me what I want on Facebook and it would be a wonderful service.
I cannot relate to liking Facebook because I never did in any of its eras but once upon a time newspaper was a competitive information technology. People would read them on the subway and at the beach. I did this, I am old enough to remember "saving" articles to read when I took a magazine into the sauna.
The same happened to algo-less social media sites.
Even if someone was crazy about facebook, there was a limited amount of content they could see from my friends, you'd be done watching everything in 10 minutes. The levels of addiction we see today on TikTok, IG, etc were not even possible.
Social media and other such things were gaining explosively popularity (and addiction) long before 'the algorithm' was even a thought. Even in the pre-social media age, newsgroups and other such social venues had a similar effect, but relatively low reach because it wasn't mainstream and there were some significant barriers to getting started.
I'd look at trends as well. There is a time when Facebook was hot and trendy, whereas now it's a place for people's parents and grandparents - while all the cool kids are on Instagram. I think it's safe to say that the shift there was more social than technological. Younger generations wanted their own thing.
And I'd see TikTok as being in the same vein there, especially as YouTube has gradually shifted away from being YouTube and more like CorpoTube. But there weren't any especially viable stateside competitors. The few that did exist basically just tried to be YouTube, but with less content and worse CDN networks.
Facebook is for parents and grandparents and honestly it’s pretty good at it.
No other place is as convenient to form small communities.
Why not give people the option? They don’t all have to use it, but it means some can.
Because the people most severely impacted don't understand that they are being severely impacted.
Sure, there’s an argument for improving the default too. I was just replying to what I thought was someone saying “it doesn’t matter, most people won’t use it, give up”
Fair enough. I legitimately hate people who do that - gaslighting people into not wanting change. I don't even understand what drives that mentality half the time.
Someone measured that if a user is teenager boy, it will take Tik Tok 9 minutest to serve misogynistic content...
I was a teenage boy in the 90s and "girls are stupid" is definitely not a Tik Tok original. Yeah, yeah, scale matters but this is not in fact the first generation to discover sex differences or vices.
You are massively underrepresenting the situation. This is not “girls have cooties”, this is full-on women bashing. This is calling all women subhuman whores who don’t deserve respect. For crying out loud, there are massive “influencers” out there whose whole job is to degrade women online. You might’ve heard of a couple of wildly popular brothers who have just been arrested for literal human trafficking who forced women to be cam girls while making money publicly bragging about it, and those guys are (again, publicly) connected to the president of the USA.
Let’s please not pretend this is even comparable to the 90s. Scale is a quality of its own, and the scale of the current situation, both in severity and reach, is very different.
Yeah, it has gone further. You wouldn't hear "kill all men" at a uni in the 90s either. But I am not convinced that this is social media because hardline feminism predates it significantly.
But could it be that formerly unrealistic levels of exposure has normalised these things that always existed, and now they are mainstream and affecting kids __due to social media__ ?
Every social media is popular because of the network effect. Even TikTok launched just under a decade ago, grew with help from China’s government and cultural isolation, and only became “mainstream” (in 2020) after already having hundreds of millions of users including celebrities like Justin Bieber.
These algorithms can be incredibly predatory towards people who engage with content they don't want to see, because they're optimizing for engagement, not enjoyment.
Engagement does not correlate with want. I know people who hated every second of their time on TikTok because it kept showing them only the most awful and traumatic shit, but for the same reason, they couldn't just leave because the reason it was traumatic was because they felt terribly guilty to leave it alone. They were shown all sorts of threats about how terrible of a person they'd be if they didn't like, share, comment, etc. and they were scared out of their mind into having to do it, and that only taught the algorithm to show them more -- to seek out only the worst, most horrible and awful and traumatic content to show them because that scared them the most and compelled them the most. It's awful, horrible, sure they shouldn't have been on TikTok at all (no one should), but it shouldn't have done that to them either
Maybe read the bill first before commenting.
The first social networks were actually social (ie relating to friends), algos came later, to better exploit attention for ads.
When twitter changed its feeds it had to force people into the new style feed by giving them a choice but wiping their choice every time they opened the app and forcing the algorithmic slop feed.
This is long overdue and I hope all countries adopt it. It should be the default and if people want to consume slop they will always have a choice to do so.
I came here expecting an apologia for the manipulative feeds of big tech, and found one at the top. If that’s not what you intended, perhaps consider that you’re acting as a useful idiot for them.
> Why do people (or at least politicians pretend to) believe that cigarettes are popular despite the content nicotine and not because of them? The reason Malboro blew up is because it gives you a surge of dopamine without having to do anything for it.
Yes - TikTok is popular, precicely because the algorithmic feeds are designed to be addictive. They show content, not because its good, not because its what you ask for, but because its exactly what will keep your eyes glued to the screen.
I would assume that the majority of users would prefer a Facebook experience that showed them just the friends and family they follow, and nothing else.
The answer/comeback is "popular with whom?"
Most of my crowd seem to have left them behind because they went from a tool where I could see what my people were up to, and maybe the odd update about a band or a business I was interested in, to "Here are 50 things you have no interest in and by the way I deprioritised what your actual friends post".
This happened so much that most of the actual friends wandered off, making those posts even rarer. There seems to be a de-networking effect.
Should government be legislating that social networks work the way I want? Very good question, probably not. Am I still happy with this change? Broadly yes.
> Just as we have basic safety standards for cars, toys or food, the duty of care applies basic standards for the online products we use every day.
Aussie here. Great to see this. I don't think this goes far enough: I'd like to see addictive algorithms, content, and doomscrolling banned entirely. Not an option to see a different feed. Illegal. It's manipulative, hurts people, hurts children: make it illegal.
Please don't start randomly prohibiting things because you dis-approve of those things.
We have, at this point, over a 100 years of evidence showing that prohibition of psychoactive substances (alcohol, cannabis, cocaine, etc) doesn't actually do much to reduce consumption but do create an immense amount of suffering not just for anyone participating in the trade or consumption of those substances, but also anyone remotely connected to them - cf the immense violence perpetrated by drug cartels in the Americas, mostly because people living in the US seem to be in denial about their appetite for drugs.
So please, stop banning things you don't like, tax and regulate them instead. Use the tax proceeds to fund "social media rehab" clinics if you'd like.
Draconian "I don't like it, it gets banned" government wasn't a good idea in 15th century Spain, it's still not a good idea now. Let your fellow citizens make bad decisions, just ensure that the government is poised to profit from them.
I’d prefer similar to Doctorow, that governments simply make scraping and republishing (anything that anyone who consents can access) explicitly legal, then alternate frontends may appear with their own algorithms.
Bingo. This is the path forward and solution to so many ills. IP needs a big rethink for the internet.
In 2023 the Australian Prime Minister Albanese was asked by Neil Mitchell on 3AW radio what he would do if he was "Dictator for a Day".
Albanese replied: "Ban social media".
Indeed.
ref: https://www.reddit.com/r/australian/comments/1gmakhz/anthony...
Red herring, you've linked to a conservative leaning sub community posting a source that is known to be generally inaccurate.
This is about legislation penalizing social media companies for shoving algorithmic slop down the throats of consumers.
But if we want to introduce political figures and their thoughts on social media; the traditional opposition party is lead by this man - someone willing to manipulate the public with social media.
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2026/feb/12/fantastic-gr...
And the newer wonderkid of the media is engaged in widespread slopaganda: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-11/foreign-fake-news-pau...
But he DID say it, right?
Or are you saying that because it's Reddit/The Daily Mail, he DIDN'T say it?
What are you talking about?
It's widely quoted and well known he said it so where are you coming from.
No, it's your source; you prove your claims.
I'll give you a hint though - the article doesn't even quote him, it just puts out a spicy headline.
What he actually said and the context:
"Ban social media. Keyboard warriors can anonymously say anything at all. Without any fear.", with regard to a misinformation bill.
Considering the sources deliberately stripped everything of context and you've repeated it without checking, would you say we have a misinformation problem with media in general, or social media?
Brilliant! I really hope they get it through, and I’ll be interested to see what impact it has on screen time app sales in the region.
I read the first sentence and thought: what is the government of Albania doing in Australia?
OMG, I've got it now
"Albanese" is the second name of the Australian Prime Minister
LOL, I was wondering too what Albania had to do with all this, not being familiar with the australian prime minister name.
Albanese is an Italian name, for the record
In Albania, Albania is called Shqipëria.
I was thinking albanese were the people of Albania (I know it's albanian, but got confuse for a moment)
Yep, I spent a hot minute puzzling over that sentence
It's unclear whether this legislation will require giving users the choice of the sort order. That's one of the tricks exploitative social networks use, selective prioritization of ragebait and other content that encourages "engagement". If you have the choice of strict chronological order, that removes a lot of the hold the networks have over you.
I don't think this goes nearly far enough, and is another example of our government latching onto a juicy trending topic and doing the bare minimum to make a positive sounding news byte out of. This should be an opt-in model for algorithmically driven content, infinite scrolling, etc. An opt out model just feels like they're compromising for the benefit of industry lobbyists on the issue.
> another example of our government latching onto a juicy trending topic and doing the bare minimum
Say it ain't so!
For those not following Australian politics, this is the theme of our times. Find a big issue that people want something done about, half-arse it and bow to corporate interests instead of taking decisive action. The big one recently has been gambling advertising. The government commissioned a report that came to the well-argued conclusion that, as the biggest gamblers in the world per capita, Australia really should ban gambling advertising. It's pervasive, offensive and way too normalised.
There appeared to be cross party support for the proposal, and widespread public support. Easy win for the party in power.
The current government sat on it for a couple of years and then came back with a watered down proposal to cap the amount it could be on tv and try to restrict it during times kids might be watching. Way to miss an open goal Albo.
The whole political charade is just getting me so angry, the thin veil of "government working for the people" rhetoric has completely fallen away to expose how directly corporate interests translate into Australian government policy.
Majority of Australians supported changes in how the resource sector is taxed - the government openly met with industry lobbyists right before the budget and just said lol no.
They went to a local byelection and their candidate was a gas lobbyist they parachuted in from a different electorate.
The gambling thing, what a joke.
The social media ban for kids that immediately turned out to be pushed by pro media lobbyists.
The military spending. My word.
They don't even try to hide it anymore, and Labor were meant to be the quasi-progressive-left option in the uniparty system. Now I view them to be equally as corrupt as the Liberal party, leaving the Greens as the only viable option in politics here. And they can never get anywhere due to the way political donations/funding is set up, along with the vested interests owning the media narrative. No one even bothers to read their policy documents because old Rupert Murdoch has their opinion covered for them.
Gah. It's nearly beer time I think.
>Majority of Australians supported changes in how the resource sector is taxed - the government openly met with industry lobbyists right before the budget and just said lol no.
The government consulted with key stakeholders before the budget? Say it ain't so! The lobbyists in question will be people with a Government Relations role, their whole job is to be the middlemen between the corporation and the government.
The main argument was calling for gas to be taxed more. This completely ignores reality of most gas being under contract until at least 2030, the government could not increase tax on this resource without breaking contracts. Hardly a wise decision. While they could increase it for future contracts, is this really the correct choice? We're trying to transition away from gas and other fossil fuels, why would we instead tie our tax revenue even closer to these resources?
>They went to a local byelection and their candidate was a gas lobbyist they parachuted in from a different electorate.
Yep, pretty tone-deaf. Not really the fault of the federal Labor govt however, this was just a classic WA Labor move, the state most beholden to these interests.
I agree with your other points. Military spending is screwed for either party, we're beholden to the US in this case.
Perhaps the goal was never about the average Australian people and none was missed.
So many of us were hopeful with this government a few years back.
Disappointing would be an understatement to describe what we have now and none of the alternatives look any better.
It is now beer time.
Right direction to move in, but probably won’t do much.
“Drug dealers are now required to give their customers the option to purchase salad instead of cocaine”.
That’s at least a choice.
The USA has a choice between two parties - democrat or republican. China only has one party, Russian has (in principle) one party and North Korea only has one dictator.
So if these places got a second party or dictator, it would be a 50% improvement.
The war on drugs was a failure, and the most successful cases (other than harsh punishments while avoiding massive drug use in the first place, like Singapore) involve legalization.
> The war on drugs was a failure
Continues to be. It’s not over; it has been going on for over half a century, and counting.
How was it that Toby Ziegler (The West Wing) put it? “Since it never ends and no one ever wins, maybe we should stop calling it a war”?
> with draft legislation for the Digital Duty of Care released today for targeted consultation.
I hope it won’t be “community consultation” like they did with the AABill… that time where the Australian government ignored everyone in the community except for a handful of lobby groups. You know… that time where people filed FOI Requests about the AABill and not a single request was responded to.
Forget politics people… you all have zero sway. The laws have already been written by The Inner Party, and they’re just drip feeding them to us over time so that we don’t notice the sudden shifting of the Overton Window to serfdom
Wouldn't the better way be is to make social media open? i.e. anyone can generate their own algorithm or chose from others who created them. I see that the social media companies could implement these requirements in the worse possible way to ensure that they opt right back in to "choose to opt in to having their default feed include personalised content recommended by the algorithm"
I talked about this in my blog post [1]. I didn't expect regulators to pay attention to the issue anytime soon—let alone move against it. So kudos to the Australian government. Enough with the free-speech and free-market rhetoric: algorithmic feeds are actively poisoning our minds and should be regulated as strictly as possible.
> The issue is that much of the problematic content doesn’t violate any law but still is poison that shouldn’t be on anyone’s feed. The easiest example is painting feminism as some evil propaganda against men, and how women’s place in the kitchen is natural order of things. Such views have gained steam in the recent times purely because of social media (algorithms).
> The ideal regulation would be to ban or heavily regulate algorithmic feeds. If you don’t follow someone, or a page, or an interest, there’s no reason for you to get that stuff on your timeline. Only things that should be shown is what you explicitly choose. And if it does, it should be easy enough to nuke it from your timeline.
[1]: https://shubhamjain.co/2026/02/25/algorithmic-feeds-need-to-...
With RSS I already do feeds my way.
Indeed,
Thats part of the premise, we don't need to invent new technologies when email/rss are already self curated / federated.
The missing piece is discovery.
Which is why in addition to allowing you to aggregate internal/external feeds into one place, each instance also shares each external feed its users have subscribed too, and each user can share who they read (like a blog roll).
Or just use https://tuhat.net,
>> 1K organic users in the last three months, ,with no marketing budget, and no VC funding.
- Chronological feed of local posts + external RSS feeds in one place
- Email newsletters / RSS
- Journaling feature
- Book log / reviews
- No Algorithms
- No like button
Opensource if you want to spin up your own instance.
I don't know what I am looking at here?
Ha, fair. The home page is a global feed of all users, limited to one post per day per user.
One of many potential solutions to an alternative to todays social media – like substack, but without the shitty sides of social media.
That's great however after seeing their feed being empty people will switch back. You can already do this on youtube by not allowing history.
No you can't, I just tried it.
I deleted all of my history and "paused" history tracking. Then I reloaded https://www.youtube.com.
My expectation: A feed of the pages I'm subscribed to.
My experience: A blank page which just says "Your watch history is off / You can change your setting at any time to get the latest videos tailored to you. [Learn more] / [Update Settings]".
Hilariously, it is exactly the same - in glorious 4K - on the YouTube app on my TV.
This is deliberately fucked in order force users into the algorithm.
> You can already do this on youtube by not allowing history.
And what a bliss that is! I love it how YouTube thinks it’s punishing me by turning off the home page recommendations if you disable history (it didn’t always do that) while it’s in fact a favour. In my country (and I assume most/every country), the default home feed is such a cesspool of vomit-inducing clickbait garbage that it boils my blood to even glance at it.
> That's great however after seeing their feed being empty people will switch back.
But yes, I have no illusion that everyone shares my aversion. Removing control from the companies will hopefully have some impact, though.
This reminds me of the YouTube creator Technology Connections trying to engage with people on bluesky, which already provides feed customization and even lets you write code to build your own feed algorithms. He loosely coined the term "algorithmic complacency" to explain how users didn't like bluesky specifically because they had to explicitly choose who or what they wanted to follow, his fear being that especially young people would rather be served slop than decide for themselves what content they want to see.
https://youtu.be/QEJpZjg8GuA
Maybe he's right, but there are way more issues with Bluesky that affect user retention. For example the app seems to love logging users out if they have intermittent Internet or are using a VPN, or just because the app feels like it. It's an insane bug or security stance.
Meanwhile, Setlog is gaining popularity in east Asia, which definitely indicates there is some demand for friend-only social media. I think many Discord users are basically using Discord like that too. Giving users the choice is the right move.
This is a pro-consumer action. Good for Australia.
Identity verification is anti-consumer. Instagram in Australia offers either ID or video selfie to prove you are over 16.
"The Albanese Government is taking the next step following its world leading social media age ban to ensure Australians have more choice online...." - Me thinking "What the heck? What Albanese government has to do with Australians? Are they under the occupation? Albanian occupation?!"
The feed options sound good in principle, although I expect the implementation to be deliberately hobbled. I've tried Facebook's existing (well hidden) chronological feed and it turns out there's so much spam in local groups that I found it unusable.
The bigger issue is the toxic "papers please" identity verification will result in a lot fewer "Australians" on the internet, who will now show up from various VPN endpoint countries, so presumably won't get the algorithm option.
4chan doesn't use any manipulative algorithms and all its feeds are time based, just saying.
Oddly, 4chan is also the only place where 2 extremely opposed sides can and regularly do interact and debate - even if a large proportion of that traffic is bot farms.
> Users can choose to opt in to having their default feed include personalised content recommended by the algorithm. Alternatively, users can opt out of personally recommended content in their default feed and see the friends and creators they choose to follow.
Does that mean they are giving platforms the choice of what’s going to be the default? That doesn’t seem like a wise plan.
for a moment, I thought the Albanese Administration was promoting RSS feeds.
I think this is a nice idea, but three koala dollars says that in a year we find out most Australians switched back to the dopamine feed after a day or two. Nice to have the choice, though.
I have been trying to trick it into turning off for ages.
I wouldnt be surprised if most people opt back in. But its better than an outright ban.
I would probably start using Facebook again if I could get a consistent, strictly chronological feed of friends’ updates.
You can. There's a friends tab
This is going to get about 0% uptake. People's preferences, as revealed by their behavior, align with the algorithmic feeds. That's the whole point of an algorithmic feed.
With Facebook, people reported not being able to see their spouses' posts. They were "Married" on Facebook, but the feed just shoved things into their faces they didn't want. It would even edit posts when you went to their pages (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14147719)
I reckon a good idea would be to force Bluesky levels of feed customization, with a choice of blocklists.
Theres alot of stuff turning up in my feeds lately that i'd rather not see.
Interesting scenarios that could happen in next few years
* American internet companies start to make the judgement that supporting EU/ANZ countries with difficult legal/tax requirements is a net cost and stop doing it, just IP-blocking those countries for the lowest legal risk
* Alternatively, American govt takes the position of "American companies don't have to follow the laws of random countries just because they accept IP packets from those countries". American companies eliminate their official business presence in onerous legal regimes but keep serving users there
* If above happens, this forces the resolution of the question "how does internet jurisdiction work across borders if USA doesn't play along", and a plausible answer is that internet messages start to be treated like physical imports and nation-level internet censorship moves under the purview of customs agencies
The globally routable internet is a very special and valuable thing, but it's a historical aberration and I suspect not very stable long-term. Even today, with the internet way more locked down than 20 years ago, it's still extremely libertarian compared to almost any other economically significant venue. In equilibrium, the state will demand its cut
> * Alternatively, American govt takes the position of "American companies don't have to follow the laws of random countries just because they accept IP packets from those countries". American companies eliminate their official business presence in onerous legal regimes but keep serving users there
Why would they do that? If they can't have a local business presence then they can't book local advertisers.
Which directly cuts any revenue they would get from the enterprise.
None of these companies need to have local business presences: they do because otherwise you can't get revenue from users in that nationality.
> American internet companies start to make the judgement that supporting EU/ANZ countries with difficult legal/tax requirements is a net cost and stop doing it, just IP-blocking those countries for the lowest legal risk
Productivity spikes, youth mental health issues trend downwards and the nutcase right-wing parties struggle to maintain momentum.
Can we have this please? Pretty please?