Will switching off the algorithm make social media less harmful?

Updated 3 November 2026 with the latest figures.

Adam Mosseri runs Instagram. At an Australian press briefing on 10 September, he warned that engagement falls by as much as 50% without the algorithm. The feed fills with posts from brands and publishers, he said. TNW

On 15 October, Communications Minister Anika Wells put the Digital Duty of Care Bill into parliament. Its headline promise lets users over 16 swap the recommendation engine for a plain feed of the accounts they follow. AFP

The bill passed the House of Representatives on 28 October. Fines for platforms that break the duty run to more than $108 million. AAP

The prize is your attention. The government argues that feeds built to keep you scrolling are part of the harm, while the platforms say the algorithm is what people want. So will an off switch change what Australians see, or just add a setting nobody uses?

For most people, probably not much. Few people ever change a default, and those who do switch trade angrier posts for more unreliable ones, then drift to other apps.

Confidence: Likely. Three parts to this: who switches, what changes when they do, and what the law actually guarantees.

Defaults stick, because changing one takes effort and most of us assume the setting we got is the normal one. The classic evidence comes from organ donation.

A 2004 study by Eric Johnson and Daniel Goldstein compared European countries. Consent rates where people had to opt out ran nearly 60 percentage points above countries where people had to opt in. Transplantation

Social media already shows the same pattern. Instagram offers a chronological view today, but it resets to the ranked feed each time you reopen the app. 9to5Google

The EU has required big platforms to offer a feed without profiling since 2023, under its Digital Services Act. No platform has published how many Europeans use it. TechPolicy.Press

The government's plan, announced on 8 September, would make platforms notify every user and let them set a chronological feed as their default. Daily Aus A one-off prompt is a nudge, and the algorithm still greets everyone who taps "not now".

Independent MP Kate Chaney won a House amendment to make it harder for platforms to bury the option deep in settings. AAP That helps at the margin, but the real effect still depends on the minority who switch.

The biggest test of a plain feed comes from the US in 2020. Meta let academics led by Andrew Guess of Princeton move consenting users to chronological feeds for three months. Time spent on Facebook and Instagram fell substantially. NYU CSMaP

Exposure to untrustworthy sources and political posts rose, uncivil posts fell on Facebook, and polarisation did not shift.

The time did not vanish. NBC News reported that mobile users in the plain-feed group spent more time on TikTok and YouTube instead. NBC News

The algorithm does push anger, though. In a 2023 experiment with 806 US Twitter users, Smitha Milli and colleagues found 62% of the algorithm's political tweets expressed anger, against 52% in the chronological feed. Knight Institute

That makes the switch useful for some people. The catch is that the bill leaves the detail of the switch to later.

On our reading of the exposure draft released in September, the words "algorithm" and "opt-out" never appear. The draft labels recommender features as having "negative behavioural impacts". Exposure draft

It then lets the minister require specific services to offer user controls later, through a separate rule. Before introduction, Labor dropped a separate power for the minister to add new categories of harm, a change the Greens had demanded. ADM+S The power over user controls stayed.

Timing matters too. The duty of care starts 12 months after the bill becomes law, and a Senate committee must report by 20 November. Pinsent Masons The Coalition opposes the bill as censorship, so Labor needs the Greens, who want steeper penalties and a right to sue.

Chanel Contos, chief executive of Teach Us Consent, helped put the plan on the agenda and wants an algorithmic feed only if you actively say yes. Mark Williams, a cognitive neuroscientist at Macquarie University, argues the fault lies in how these products are built. Macquarie University

Their best evidence is strong. When Hunt Allcott and colleagues paid 1,661 Americans to quit Facebook for four weeks in 2018, they freed about 60 minutes a day and reported higher wellbeing. NBER

That case gets two things right. Less ranked feed does mean less time on the app, and if "off" became the default, the stickiness of defaults would work for the reformers.

The evidence pushes back on the bill as drafted, though. Quitting Facebook differs from swapping feeds, and some plain-feed users moved their time to other apps. An opt-out prompt also leaves the old default in place.

Nobody outside the platforms knows how many Europeans use their non-profiling feeds. Some coverage since the House vote describes users opting in to algorithmic feeds, but no published text we found sets "off" as the default. The verdict assumes the algorithm stays the default and that US experiments carry over to Australian users.

An off switch for the algorithm will change little for most Australians unless the government makes "off" the default. Confidence: Likely. If that holds, platforms keep most of their engagement and ad revenue, while heavy users who switch win back some time.

We drew on 22 sources: the exposure draft bill, four peer-reviewed studies, news reports from Australia, the US and Europe, legal analysis, and expert commentary. This piece was first written on 18 October 2026 and refreshed on 3 November 2026 after the bill passed the House on 28 October. Reports differ slightly on the maximum fine (AFP $109.2 million, AAP $108.2 million), so we give the lower bound. We could not open the full Science paper, so we report its findings in words rather than percentages, and we found no published uptake figures for Europe's non-profiling feeds. Every figure comes straight from its source; we did no further arithmetic. Researched with AI tools; checked and edited by VOID.

The government wants to let you switch off the social media algorithm and see only accounts you follow, and the bill passed the House on 28 October. Most people never change default settings, and studies show people who switch see less anger but more dodgy sources, then spend their time on other apps. It only really changes things if "off" becomes the starting point, and the bill does not do that yet.