Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese confirmed draft Digital Duty of Care legislation on September 8, 2026, that would require major social-media platforms to give Australians over the age of 16 a durable choice between an algorithmically curated feed and a follow-only feed showing content solely from accounts they have chosen to follow. Communications Minister Anika Wells said affected users would see a prompt asking whether they want the platform's algorithm to determine what appears in their feed, or whether they prefer to see only posts from friends and creators they have deliberately selected.
Non-compliance with the proposed rules would carry penalties exceeding A$100 million, a sanction scale designed to ensure meaningful enforcement against platforms with the financial resources to otherwise treat smaller fines as a routine cost of doing business. The same legislative package would also require platforms, including gaming services and AI chatbots, to limit children's exposure to categories of harmful content such as pornography, material promoting eating disorders, misogynistic content and material glorifying crime.
The proposal builds directly on Australia's earlier social-media age-limit legislation, and is being framed domestically as part of a broader 'global reckoning' with the influence of engagement-optimised algorithmic ranking systems that critics argue have contributed to a range of social harms, from mental-health impacts among young users to the amplification of extreme or polarising content. Australia has positioned itself as an early and relatively aggressive mover among democracies in regulating platform design choices, rather than limiting intervention to content moderation alone.
Critics of the proposal have noted an important limitation: opting out of an algorithmic feed still leaves users viewing content from the accounts they already follow, meaning individuals already embedded within harmful online communities — such as pro-eating-disorder networks or extremist 'manosphere' content ecosystems — would not automatically be protected simply by switching to a follow-only feed, since the underlying accounts they follow remain unchanged. Some critics have also pointed to prior instances in which platforms, including Meta, reverted users back to algorithmic feeds following earlier European experiments with similar opt-out mechanisms, raising questions about how durably platforms will honour user preferences absent continued regulatory pressure.
If enacted and enforced as currently drafted, the legislation would represent one of the strongest statutory interventions yet against engagement-based ranking algorithms globally, potentially forcing significant product redesigns at major platforms including Meta, TikTok, Google and X within the Australian market. The approach also offers a concrete template that regulators in other democracies weighing similar interventions may study closely, given the relative rarity of legislation that targets algorithmic feed design directly, rather than focusing solely on content categories or age-verification requirements.
For global technology platforms, the Australian proposal adds to a growing patchwork of jurisdiction-specific regulatory requirements around algorithmic transparency and user control, following broadly similar, though generally less prescriptive, feed-choice provisions that have emerged in parts of the European Union. As more governments consider comparable measures, platforms may increasingly face pressure to build feed-choice functionality as a standard global product feature, rather than maintaining narrow, jurisdiction-specific compliance implementations.
