Australia plans to create new laws to give people more control over what they see on social media platforms. This new "Digital Duty of Care" law would change the Online Safety Act. If passed, it would ask large companies like Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and X to let users turn off the systems that choose what posts they see. If users switch off these recommendation systems, their social media feed would show posts in time order from the accounts they follow.

The most important reason for this plan is to help protect users, especially young people, from seeing harmful content. Anika Wells, Australia’s Communications Minister, supports this law as a way to give people more choice online and stop unwanted content from being shown to them by algorithms, which are computer programmes that select posts for users.

If the law is approved, social media companies that do not obey the rules may get large fines. The proposal is expected to be discussed in the Australian parliament soon, and details about how people can control the settings will become clearer after the draft law is shared.