Prime Minister Anthony Albanese speaks to the media at Parliament House on September 8, 2026 in Canberra, Australia. The Albanese government is preparing new digital duty of care laws that would require digital platforms to take greater responsibility for preventing and addressing online harms. (Photo by Hilary Wardhaugh/Getty Images)On September 8, the Australian government released an exposure draft of its proposed Digital Duty of Care, a welcome and necessary reform requiring online services to proactively identify foreseeable risks of harm and take reasonable steps to address them. It is a positive step towards protecting children, in particular, from the worst forms of harm originating online.The draft bill also requires platforms to provide “user empowerment tools,” which are yet to be specified. But across press conferences, interviews and media coverage, encouraged by the government’s messaging, media outlets and commentators seized on an idea far simpler than the full proposed reforms: Australians would be able, for the first time, to turn off ‘the algorithm’.Branded “My Feed, My Way,” the government sold the duty of care as a proposal to provide safety for vulnerable users — especially children — and to give users aged 16+ greater control over whether their primary social media feed maintains the status quo of algorithmically recommended content or reverts to only displaying material from accounts they choose to follow, in chronological or reverse chronological…

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