Australia Mandates Social Media User Opt-Outs
Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production. The consumer in this story is the Australian parent scrolling in the evening, or the young person whose evening is scrolled for them by an algorithm they did not choose and cannot see, and whose feed has been arranged by engineers employed not by that person but by the platform. Let us ask whether this arrangement, as it stands, serves them.
The platforms will say, and say with some sincerity, that the algorithm is a service - that it learns preference, saves time, surfaces what the user would have wanted had he known to ask for it. There is truth in this. A merchant who anticipates my want before I have voiced it has done me a kindness, provided the anticipation is honest. But the honest anticipation and the profitable anticipation are not always the same thing, and it is precisely here that the sympathy test earns its keep. Stand where the user stands. He did not commission the feed to maximise his time on the platform; he commissioned it, if he commissioned anything, to be informed and entertained. The platform’s engineers, however, are paid by shareholders whose interest is engagement, not enlightenment, and engagement is most reliably purchased by content that provokes rather than content that satisfies. The two aims may coincide. They frequently do not.
The dealer in cloth has an interest in persuading you that scarcity justifies his price; the dealer in attention has an interest in persuading you that his ordering of your feed is a neutral courtesy rather than a commercial instrument. Both dealers deserve a hearing. Neither deserves to be believed without inquiry.
What is notable in the Australian proposal - and its stakes are described, tellingly, in terms of harm to children and exposure to divisive material rather than in terms of price or product quality - is that it does not forbid the algorithm. It does not nationalise the feed or fix its content by statute, which would be a cure very likely worse than the disease. It proposes only that the user be permitted to decline it: to receive, if he wishes, the plain chronological accounting of what his connections have posted, undecorated by the platform’s judgment of what will hold him longest. This is a modest remedy, and I confess I find modest remedies more trustworthy than sweeping ones, since the sweeping remedy is usually drafted by men who believe they know your good better than you do.
The platforms will object that few users will exercise the option, that defaults matter more than choices, that offering an exit is a fig leaf over a door nobody opens. This objection deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed, for it may well be true - and if it is true, it is itself a discovery of some importance, since it would tell us that the algorithm’s grip owes less to its usefulness than to the friction the platform has engineered against leaving it. A shopkeeper who fears his customers will not return once shown the exit is not a shopkeeper whose wares I trust unreservedly.
The stated case for the Australian rule - protection of children, reduction of exposure to dangerous content - is a case made in the language of harm rather than the language of price, and I do not think this an accident. The social media firm, unlike the cloth merchant, does not charge the user in coin; it charges him in attention, which he spends without ever seeing the bill. A regulation compelling an opt-out is, in effect, an attempt to itemise a bill that has until now been rendered invisible. Whether the Australian government has drafted this well, we cannot yet know, since the article itself confesses the consequences are untested. But the principle behind it - that the man paying in attention deserves to see the ledger and choose his own arrangement with the shop - is one I would defend in any market, whether it trades in bread, in cloth, or in the ordering of a stranger’s evening.