Australia Plans to Let Users Switch Off Social Media Algorithms

There is a gate across this road, and the gate is called the algorithm, and the Australian government proposes to hand every citizen a key to it. The modern man says: I see no reason for this fence except that Meta and Google and TikTok wished to keep me scrolling, and that reason is a bad one, so let us tear the whole structure down. He may well be right. But before I cheer him I want to know what the fence was actually doing, because in my experience the fence that was built to trap you was also, quite often, the fence that kept out something worse.

The algorithm was built, we are told, to hold your attention and sell it to advertisers. This is true and is usually the whole of what is said about it. But a thing built for one purpose frequently does another job nobody notices until it stops. The algorithm also decides, for a woman in Perth who has just lost a husband, that she should perhaps not see forty consecutive posts about euthanasia; it decides, for a boy in Adelaide who searched once out of idle curiosity, that he should not be walked by gentle, profitable steps into a room full of men who hate him for being fourteen and unformed. I do not say it does this well. I say it does it, badly, as a side effect of doing something else entirely, the way a hedge planted to mark a property line also happens to stop the wind.

Now the reformer arrives with his switch. He says: let the user choose chronological order, let the user choose no order at all, let the user be free of the manipulation. But notice what the reformer has not told us, which is what fills the gap once the gate swings open. Turn off the algorithm and you are not returned to some pastoral state of unmediated human contact with your second cousin’s holiday photographs. You are returned to raw sequence, and raw sequence, on a platform built by Meta or Google or TikTok for a billion strangers, is not neutral either - it merely hands the sorting to whoever posts fastest and loudest and most, which in practice means the fanatic, the bot, and the man with nothing else to do at three in the morning. The algorithm was a bad ruler. Chronology is anarchy with the appearance of order, and anarchy, as every villager knows and every reformer forgets, is not the absence of tyranny but its precondition.

The tech companies will comply, of course, because the penalties are the only fence they respect, and they will build the switch exactly wide enough to satisfy the regulator and no wider, which is the oldest trick in commerce and older than commerce, being the trick of the schoolboy asked to tidy his room who moves everything under the bed. Watch, when this law passes, whether the “off” position quietly still ranks by engagement, still nudges, still curates through some laundered proxy called “recency-weighted relevance,” because a company that built its entire fortune on sorting will not hand you unsorted chaos; it will hand you a different sort dressed as no sort at all, and call it freedom because you asked for freedom and freedom is what they are contractually obliged to sell you.

So the fence is worth questioning, and I question it happily, being by temperament the sort of Englishman who trusts a citizen of Sydney over a boardroom in Menlo Park in every dispute between the two. But the citizens deserve to be told, before they reach for the switch, that turning it off does not return them to a garden. It returns them to a jungle that has simply removed its one incompetent gardener. Legislate the switch, by all means - I am not the man who forbids the gate be opened. Only do not act surprised, a year from now, when the un-algorithmed feed of some ordinary Australian fills up with exactly the loudest voices the algorithm was, however clumsily, built to muffle, and someone asks who left this gate open, and the answer is: everyone who was too clever to ask why it was shut.