Varsha Yajman was 13 when she joined social media. She was already self-conscious about how she looked, and the feeds did not help: endless workout videos making impossible promises, strangers diarising everything they ate, girls she had never met urging her to sign up to dangerous calorie challenges.
"I was like, 'I don't need to eat. I can just watch other people eat,'" she told the BBC. "I would find that I'd be down these really deep rabbit holes… it was like no matter how hard you tried to get out, you couldn't."
Now 24 and in recovery from anorexia, Yajman says she is still served weight-loss content on social media — despite having every safety setting turned on and an exhaustive list of banned words. Flynn Martin's spiral took a different route: the Melbourne man, struggling with undiagnosed bipolar disorder in his early twenties, found feeds dominated by manosphere content — including the self-proclaimed misogynist influencer Andrew Tate — an echo chamber that ended only after psychosis and a hospital stay.
It is people like them the Australian government says it is trying to protect with a new suite of laws introduced to parliament this week — laws whose centrepiece is something disarmingly simple: a switch to turn the algorithm off. The BBC reported the proposals from Sydney.
My Feed, My Way
Under the proposed legislation, social media platforms would be required to offer users a genuine and enduring choice over what appears in their feeds. With the switch flipped, users would see only posts from accounts they actively follow — the way social media operated in the early 2010s, before engagement-maximising recommendation engines took over. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has framed the measure as a return of control to the user: "If people want to doom scroll, that's fine."
The proposal — dubbed "My Feed, My Way" — forms part of a broader Digital Duty of Care framework. The duty would place a legal responsibility on online services, including social media, gaming platforms and chatbots, to maintain a safe environment where reasonably practicable. Children would need protection from harmful material and from design features that push it; adults would be covered against a narrower category of seriously harmful and illegal content.
Communications Minister Anika Wells argues the legislation marks a philosophical shift: responsibility moving from victims to the large operators that design the feeds. Breaches could attract fines of up to A$100 million — a figure intended to make compliance a board-level concern rather than a moderation-team afterthought. Australia's eSafety Commissioner, which already enforces some of the world's toughest online-safety rules, would be central to policing the new regime.
From petition to parliament
The proposal did not arrive from nowhere. It follows the Fix Our Feeds campaign led by consent education advocate Chanel Contos, who wanted recommendations switched off by default, with users able to opt back in. Her petition gathered more than 15,000 signatures and was backed by two former prime ministers and a coalition of safety experts. Ministers adopted a version of the idea in September — but stopped short of the automatic off setting campaigners wanted, settling instead for a prominent, durable choice.
A Teach Us Consent poll found that 78% of Australians want full control over what they see online — a number that explains why the government feels it has the political wind at its back. Australia has form here: in December last year it became the first country in the world to bar children under 16 from holding accounts on major social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. The new legislation extends the ambition from who may use the platforms to how the platforms may treat those who use them.
The industry's dilemma
The Facebook app icon shown on a smartphone screen
Yuri Samoilov / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).
Australia is not the first jurisdiction to target recommender systems. The European Union's Digital Services Act already requires the largest platforms to offer users a recommender system not based on profiling. But existing algorithm controls have often proved transient — buried in settings menus, reset by updates, or offered with deliberate trade-offs in functionality. Australia has set out to make its version tighter, requiring that the choice be genuine and enduring, and that platforms notify both new and existing users about the options.
The tech industry will argue, as it has elsewhere, that the reforms threaten the free at-the-point-of-use model and amount to design by legislature. The Australian government counters that the evidence is now overwhelming: research links heavy social media use to brain responses resembling gambling and addiction, finds algorithms can push harmful posts toward vulnerable users, and warns of disinformation and rising polarisation.
For Albanese, the political calculation is that choice is hard to argue against. Users who like the algorithm can keep it — the switch simply asks platforms to respect the decision either way. "You will have a choice about whether you want the algorithm or whether you want the following feed," he said. "That is a neutral choice that Australians will be able to make. It's empowering."
Whether the legislation passes, and in what form, is now in parliament's hands. But the direction of travel is clear: after banning the under-16s from social media entirely, Australia is now coming for the feeds themselves — and the companies whose business models depend on them are watching very closely.
The debate echoes questions being asked on other fronts. Our Technology coverage follows how regulators are confronting platform harms, from Ofcom's investigation into Meta's Instagram safety measures to OpenAI's teen safety report. And Yajman and Martin's stories underline what our reporting on young people and mental health has found: growing up online is getting harder. More in our News coverage or on the homepage.
