“Whether they want to keep the algorithm, whether they want to do things a different way, it should be their choice, not big tech’s choice,” Communications Minister Anika Wells told the debate over Australia’s proposed digital duty of care.
My Feed, My Way: a narrow break with default platforms
The government’s “My Feed, My Way” approach seeks to force platforms to offer Australians a meaningful alternative to opaque recommendation systems. In practice, the choice being discussed in public debate is currently binary: the platform’s engagement-optimised recommendation engine or a following-only, reverse-chronological feed. The article stresses an important technical point often overlooked in that framing — a chronological feed is itself an algorithm: it sorts posts by timestamp, newest first.
The policy does deserve credit for “breaking the default” and requiring platforms to respect a user’s selection. But the choice on offer is narrow, and existing evidence complicates simple assumptions about which feed is healthier. Large field experiments on Facebook and Instagram found that switching users to a reverse chronological feed reduced both time spent and activity on the platforms. The same research reported greater exposure to content from sources classified as untrustworthy and no detectable reduction in political polarisation. The eSafety Commissioner has also noted that users sometimes switch back to engagement-optimised feeds despite claiming they dislike them.
Bluesky’s experiment: thousands of custom feeds
A different model is already in the wild. Bluesky — described in the piece as a Twitter-like social network — lets users and third-party developers create, install and customise different feed algorithms, rather than locking everyone into a single ranking system. One recent study counted 97,719 custom feeds on Bluesky. The article’s author says they used Bluesky’s new AI-assisted feed builder to create a personal feed ranking recent posts from Australian journalists, China watchers and others according to signals they value.
The platform also demonstrates non-intuitive behaviour around user perception: the author notes one custom feed exists solely to surface posts by people who argue Bluesky “doesn’t have an algorithm” — on a platform that in fact offers more algorithmic choice than almost any other. The author also counts “more than 47 federal politicians” present on Bluesky.
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See what we buildMiddleware: a Stanford proposal to unbundle editorial power
The article invokes a 2020 Stanford working group paper led by Francis Fukuyama that proposed a “middleware” industry. Middleware, as described, would place independent services between users and dominant platforms to offer competing ways to rank, label and curate the same underlying content. Rather than choose only between Meta’s recommendation engine and Meta’s chronological feed, users could pick ranking systems offered by a news organisation, a university, a civil-society group or other providers.
But middleware is not a simple technical add-on. The piece warns it raises “hard questions” about data access, privacy safeguards, commercial incentives, liability and governance, and is “certainly not something Canberra could easily bolt onto this legislation tomorrow.”
What this means for the government, platforms, and end users
- The government: the reform establishes a regulatory principle that platforms should not have an absolute right to determine a user’s information environment. Stage one is breaking the default; stage two, the article argues, should be to expand the array of choices.
- Platforms: they remain responsible for dealing with illegal material and meeting baseline safety obligations, while also being required to offer and respect a meaningful alternative to their own ranking systems.
- End users and civil-society curators: giving people more algorithms to choose from will only work if those options are intelligible and trustworthy. The article stresses that education and services that turn ranking into a consumable, trusted product will be necessary for people to “actually choose whose algorithm they trust.”
Conclusion: don’t stop at two options
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is quoted as saying the reform is “not about giving government control, it is about giving people control.” The article takes that as a starting point and presses for a more ambitious posture: don’t simply swap one default editorial power for another or hand it to a regulator. Instead, build toward a system in which Australians can choose whose algorithm they trust — whether that be a platform, a university, a news organisation, a civil-society group, or a bespoke personal ranking they assemble themselves.
One concrete, modest proposal in the piece: the government could help loosen existing network effects by sharing major breaking announcements on Bluesky 10 minutes before X. The broader point remains: the debate is not about “algorithms” versus “no algorithms” — it is about who chooses them and how much editorial power is distributed across users, platforms and intermediaries.
