Australians Could Soon Opt Out of Social Media Algorithms Altogether
“The Australian government is proposing to give social media users the option to switch off the default algorithmic feed, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced on Tuesday. Under the draft legislation, “Digital Duty of Care”, users could opt to see only posts from the people they follow on platforms like Instagram or TikTok, instead of what the algorithm curates for them personally.”
Now this really does make sense for quite a few reasons:
* It would go a long way to cutting down on the social media “doom-scrolling” addition that many users have.
* It is a cleaner feed which is more relevant to users wanting to follow family or friends.
* It is an easy measure to hold Big Tech accountable for.
* Most importantly too it should cut down on many viral posts with misinformation etc, as the user should actually not see those being inserted into the feed.
* This indirectly also reduces the spread of viral misinformation, as they can't take root across all users' feeds anymore.
It's not going to stop adverts being served, nor metadata being harvested by Big Tech (nor the sharing of that data to data brokers or “partners”). For this, you still want to rather move off to decentralised and federated types of social media.
See
Australians Could Soon Opt Out of Social Media Algorithms Altogether
Months after kicking off a wave of teen social media bans, Australia is now coming for social media algorithms.
#technology #socialmedia #doomscrolling
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