On ABC’s Insiders program on Sunday, federal Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek said the government is exploring whether Australians should be able to opt in to algorithmically curated social media feeds.

The idea has been championed by sexual consent activist Chanel Contos. Her organisation, Teach Us Consent, is running a campaign which calls for personalised recommendation algorithms to become opt-in. Instead, users would have, by default, a chronological feed containing posts from accounts they have decided to follow.

There are some positive aspects to the proposal. But a chronological feed is not really a “non-algorithmic” feed. It still relies on an algorithm, albeit an exceptionally simple one: take a collection of posts, order them according to time, and show the newest first.

This might sound pedantic. But it points to something missing from the current debate. The problem is not that social media platforms use algorithms. Almost every digital system we interact with uses algorithms to decide what information to sort, filter, or display.

The better question is what are we asking those algorithms to optimise for, and who gets to decide.

How we got to this point

Early social media feeds were relatively simple. You followed accounts and their posts appeared, generally in reverse chronological order.

Over time, and largely driven by commercial imperatives, platforms moved towards increasingly sophisticated and secretive recommendation algorithms. Today, much of what appears in our social media feeds may come from accounts we have never encountered before.

Contemporary recommendation algorithms use our........

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