On Tuesday, the Albanese government announced draft laws that would let Australians switch off, or opt out of social media algorithms. The policy is called “My Feed, My Way”, and it is currently out for targeted consultation. Under it, social media platforms would have to give every user over 16 a genuine choice: keep a personalised feed driven by recommendations, or opt out and see only content from the accounts they already follow.
On the surface, that sounds like a win for users. More control, less manipulation, fewer doom-scroll spirals. We understand why it polls well, and we are not going to pretend the intent behind it is anything other than reasonable.
Our concern is with the part nobody in Canberra seems to have costed: what it does to the small businesses that have spent years building an audience on these platforms. Because the reach those businesses depend on does not come from their followers alone. It comes from the algorithm.
What the Government Actually Announced
The proposal would force platforms like Instagram, Facebook and TikTok to offer users a clear switch. Opt in, and you get the recommended, algorithm-curated feed you have now. Opt out, and your feed shows only the friends and creators you have chosen to follow, with the recommendation engine turned off. Platforms would have to notify both new and existing users so they can set their preference.
The measure sits alongside the under-16 social media ban that took effect in December 2025, and a broader push to give people more say over what lands in front of them. Communications Minister Anika Wells has framed the wider agenda as holding big tech accountable, with significant penalties for platforms that fail to comply.
We have no argument with user choice as a principle. We have a very specific argument with what happens to a local business the moment a meaningful slice of its potential audience flips that switch to off.
We Said the Last Intervention Wouldn’t Work. It Didn’t.
When the under-16 ban was announced, we said it wouldn’t achieve what it set out to, because the enforcement mechanism was weaker than the workaround. A free VPN and a borrowed birthday were always going to beat an age-assurance prompt.
The government’s own regulator has now confirmed it. According to the eSafety Commissioner (2026), three months after the ban began, use of age-restricted platforms among children aged 10 to 15 had fallen only from around 86% to 81.5%. Account ownership dropped from roughly 52% to 42%, but frequency of use barely moved, and more than half of the children surveyed said the platforms had not even asked them to confirm their age. A world-first law, and the behaviour it targeted shifted by a few percentage points.
We are not point-scoring here. We mention the ban because it reveals a pattern. A headline-friendly intervention gets announced. The consequences for the people at the sharp end get worked out later, if at all. My Feed, My Way looks like the same shape of decision, except this time the people at the sharp end are business owners.
Europe Already Ran This Experiment
We do not have to guess how a well-meaning tech regulation plays out for small business, because Europe already tested one at scale. When the EU brought in its GDPR privacy laws in 2018, the stated goal was to protect consumers. The measured result was a shift of power toward the biggest platforms.
Researchers tracking more than 27,000 websites found that once the GDPR took effect, sites cut ties with smaller technology vendors and kept the large ones, and the advertising technology market became measurably more concentrated. Every vendor lost ground, but Google lost the least and grew its share in advertising and analytics (Johnson, Shriver and Goldberg, Management Science, 2023). A rule aimed at big tech handed big tech a larger slice.
The smaller players fared worse. One study found that roughly a third of available apps disappeared in the wake of the GDPR, and the rate of new apps launching fell by about half (Janssen and colleagues, 2022). Venture funding for young European tech firms dropped by double digits compared with the United States, with the newest companies hit hardest (Jia, Jin and Wagman, Marketing Science, 2021).
The reason is not complicated. A big platform has the legal team, the compliance budget and, above all, the first-party data to absorb a rule like this without breaking stride. A small business has none of those things. When the open, low-cost channel narrows, the advantage flows to whoever is large enough to own the expensive, walled-off alternative.
Not every effect was permanent, and stronger privacy protection is a genuine benefit worth having. But the durable mark the GDPR left was on advertising concentration and on the smallest firms, and that is precisely the pattern worth watching here. The algorithm opt-out narrows a different channel, organic reach rather than open data, but the structural move is the same. Close off the free path, and business flows to the platforms big enough to sell you the paid one.
Why This Matters for Your Business
Here is what our gravely concerned politicians aren’t aware of. When a follower opts out, your posts still reach them, arguably more reliably than they do now, because the algorithm is no longer deciding whether to show your content or bury it. That part is fine.
The damage is to discovery. The single biggest reason a small business posts on social media is to reach people who do not follow it yet. That reach comes almost entirely from the recommendation engine: the “suggested for you” slot, the reel that surfaces beyond your audience, the post that gets pushed to people with matching interests. For every user who opts out, that pathway closes. You can no longer earn your way into their feed with good content. You are invisible to them unless they already follow you.
For an established brand with a loyal base, that stings. For a growing local business trying to build an audience from a standing start, it removes the main engine of growth. The whole promise of organic social, that a genuinely good post can find new customers for free, depends on the algorithm doing exactly the thing this policy lets people turn off.
Nobody yet knows what the opt-out rate will be. It might be modest. But organic reach has been declining for years regardless, as the platforms steadily tilt the feed toward paid placements, and this hands users a formal switch to accelerate the trend. The direction of travel is not in doubt, and prudent businesses plan for direction, not just for certainty.
The Likely Result: Paying to Reach the Audience You Already Earned
Our prediction is straightforward. As organic discovery narrows, the only reliable way left to reach beyond your existing followers will be to pay for it. Social media advertising stops being the optional accelerator and becomes the baseline cost of being seen.
A rule sold as giving power back to users effectively transfers marketing budget from Australian small businesses to Meta and X.
That, we think, will be the quiet outcome of this policy. The reach you built over years, through consistent posting and content people actually wanted, becomes something you increasingly have to rent back from the platform that used to give it away.
We are not against paid advertising. We run it every day, and done well it delivers. The problem is one of fairness and of who absorbs the cost. A large brand can fund its way around a reach cliff. The cafe, the trades business and the two-person consultancy cannot always do that, and they are the ones this lands on hardest.
And in Australia, small businesses are the economy. Businesses with fewer than 20 people make up 97.2% of all Australian businesses and employ more than 5 million people, around 39% of the private sector workforce (ABS figures compiled by the Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman). Widen the lens to all small and medium businesses and the figure climbs to around two-thirds of the workforce, roughly the OECD average.
That reliance runs deeper here than in the large industrial economies we often get compared to. In Germany, where the economy leans on big manufacturers, small and medium businesses employ around 63% of workers, below the European average (European Commission and Eurostat data). Australia does not have that heavy industrial base to fall back on.
So much for sticking it to the tech giants. This policy lifts the cost of doing business for the firms that employ most of the country.
A Quick Word on Priorities
It is worth noting where government energy is going. This is the same regulatory instinct that recently saw a play-money casino stripped out of Grand Theft Auto for Australian players, because simulated gambling with fake currency fell foul of the classification rules.
Meanwhile, real-money gambling is advertised during the footy, promoted across a growing number of pubs, and reform of those gambling ads has crawled along for years despite repeated calls to act.
A pretend casino in a video game gets locked down, while real problem gambling barely gets touched. Reasonable people can disagree on any single one of these decisions. Taken together, they do not describe a government with a firm grip on the difference between a real harm and a convenient target.
What Small Businesses Should Do About It Now
The policy is still in consultation, so nothing changes tomorrow. But the smart move is to reduce your dependence on reach you do not own, and to do it before you are forced to.
First, build channels you control. An email list, a website that ranks, and a direct relationship with your customers cannot be switched off by a feature toggle or a platform algorithm change. If social is currently your only path to your audience, that is a single point of failure worth fixing.
Second, treat paid social as a lever to pull deliberately, not a panic response after your organic reach falls off a cliff. The businesses that will handle this well are the ones that already understand their numbers: what a lead costs, what a customer is worth, and which campaigns actually pay for themselves.
Third, keep posting good organic content anyway. Followers who opt out will see it more reliably, not less, and owned reach to an engaged audience is exactly the asset that becomes more valuable as borrowed reach gets scarcer.
The government may well believe it is handing power back to users. From where we sit, watching what these decisions do to local businesses, it looks like one more cost quietly moved onto the people least able to carry it.
