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Australia to force social media platforms to allow users to opt out of algorithms
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Chris Remington beehaw.org remington@beehaw.org
Joined: 2022-01-28
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84   Original
Sibbo sopuli.xyz Sibbo@sopuli.xyz
Joined: 2023-06-06
#2 · Quote Reply

So then there's gonna be an option for a strictly chronological timeline?

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Paul Sutton (zleap) techhub.social zleap@techhub.social
Joined: 2025-10-05
#3 · Quote Reply

@remington Why doesn't Australia just promote Fedi, there are no algorithms to turn off.?

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schnurrito discuss.tchncs.de schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
Joined: 2023-06-24
#4 · Quote Reply

@remington Why doesn't Australia just promote Fedi, there are no algorithms to turn off.?

because these politicians know extremely little about the Internet

I started participating in online communities in the 2000s. The "social media" we had back then was web forums, organized by topics and sorted chronologically. I was young enough at the time that it is now permanently stored in my brain that that is the normal way the Internet should be like, and everything popularized since then (recommendation algorithms, the idea that we should follow people instead of topics, even the idea that websites shouldn't be specific to certain topics) is a deviation from normalcy.

I know, rationally, that those deviations from normalcy are now the new normal (even the fediverse is "only" an attempt to improve further on that, not a move toward the Internet of the 2000s), but there is still a part of my brain that doesn't accept this.

But I very strongly suspect that those politicians, in Australia and elsewhere, who are now trying to regulate the Internet, never posted anything to a traditional web forum, or edited a wiki, or anything like that. To them, "social media" became a thing (at all!) in around 2008 to 2010 when they created Twitter and Facebook accounts in order to communicate with their voters. (Reality check: social media has been a thing since, at the latest, the 1980s, when Usenet was invented.)

If they don't know that the Internet is not Facebook, then it's unsurprising when they regulate the internet as if it’s all just Facebook, so that all that will be left is Facebook. Sad times we are living in.

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Galactose sopuli.xyz biotin7@sopuli.xyz
Joined: 2025-08-05
#5 · (edited) Quote Reply

Ok but why can't you just force social media to make the users opted-out as default & not opt-in ?

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locuester lemmy.zip locuester@lemmy.zip
Joined: 2023-06-22
#6 · Quote Reply

So then there's gonna be an option for a strictly chronological timeline?

No. That’s an algorithm.

So is filtering to only friends and hiding blocked users.

So no algo, no feed at all really.

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samwise_gamgee beehaw.org samwise_gamgee@beehaw.org
Joined: 2023-06-10
#7 · Quote Reply

No. That’s an algorithm. So is filtering to only friends and hiding blocked users. So no algo, no feed at all really.

Filtering to only friends' posts displayed in what order?

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Swedneck discuss.tchncs.de Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
Joined: 2023-06-10
#8 · Quote Reply

No. That’s an algorithm. So is filtering to only friends and hiding blocked users. So no algo, no feed at all really.

you just get posts in precisely whateverthefuck order the server ends up pulling them from its database, which isn't an algorithm because obviously that means the Lord himself is deciding the order of your feed.

2
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