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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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...
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
Yep, I spent a hot minute puzzling over that sentence
Albanese is an Italian name, for the record
In Albania, Albania is called Shqipëria.
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.
And OMG, have you seen what youtube looks like on a new computer before you log in.
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.
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.
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-...
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.
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.
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
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.
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)
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
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?