Data Analysis with service
Turning off the algorithm
The button that shows you only the accounts you follow already exists on almost every app. It is buried and it lasts until you close the app. Australia wants to force them to ask you, with fines of up to 109 million.
By Violeta Ayala — Tecnóloga Creativa
The button
I open Instagram to see what a friend posted and twenty minutes later I am watching a video of a man I do not know repairing a motorbike in Indonesia, and I do not remember deciding any of it.
That is not an accident and it is not a failure of willpower, it is the design working exactly as it was built, because the order of what I see was not chosen by me.
On September 8, 2026, the Australian government released draft legislation that would force platforms to give me a button to switch that off. The draft was not published openly: it went out for targeted consultation, meaning to a selected group of stakeholders.
It is called My Feed, My Way, and it sits inside a wider regime called the Digital Duty of Care.
How to turn it off today
Before getting to what Australia proposes, the useful part: on almost every platform that button already exists and almost nobody uses it, because it is buried, it is not switched on by default, and above all because it lasts only until you close the app.
Tap the name of your app and the route is there, step by step.
Where the button is in each app
Routes verified in September 2026. Menus change often.
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See only the accounts you follow
- Open Instagram and stay on the home screen.
- Tap the word Instagram, top left.
- Choose Following. You will see, in time order, only the accounts you follow.
Erase what it learned about you
- Go to your profile and open the three-line menu.
- Tap Content preferences.
- Tap Reset suggested content.
Favourites does the same as Following, but with a short list you build yourself.
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See only the accounts you follow
- At the top of the screen, next to For You, tap Following.
Reset your For You feed
- Go to your profile and open the menu.
- Tap Settings and privacy.
- Go to Content preferences.
- Tap Refresh your For You feed.
After the reset, TikTok starts learning about you from scratch.
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See posts in time order
- Open the menu and go to Feeds.
- Choose Friends. It is ordered by date.
Train it by hand
- On the three dots of each post, tap Not interested.
- Unfollow the pages you do not want to see.
- Add the people you do want to see to Favourites.
Facebook has no button to reset the whole algorithm.
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See only the accounts you follow
- There are two tabs at the top: For You and Following.
- Tap Following. It is chronological and only shows accounts you follow.
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Switch off recommendations
- Tap your profile picture and go to Your data in YouTube.
- Pause your watch history.
- Pause your search history too.
With history paused, the home screen stops recommending and you have to search or go to Subscriptions, which is the list of what you chose to follow.
The option exists on all of them. On none of them is it on by default, and on several it resets when you close the app.
My experiment
Since December 2025 Instagram has had a feature called Your Algorithm, which reached the main feed in June 2026 and lives in Settings, Content preferences. There the app shows you an AI-generated summary of the topics it believes matter to you, and lets you ask for more or less of each one.
I opened it and it told me this: lately you have been into South American culture, bespoke style and tech nonprofits. Below, the tags: Bolivia, Cochabamba, Mozilla Foundation, AI in filmmaking, custom fashion, contemporary art.
That is the segmentation profile, made visible. This whole series has been describing in the abstract what the app itself showed me on one screen: who it thinks I am, and why it sends me what it sends me.
I did two things. I retuned those topics so the feed would look like the people I actually know, and I switched on the daily limit, another buried feature that warns you once you pass thirty minutes.
I was averaging one hour and fifty-five minutes a day in the app. I am now at thirty.
Here is the honest part, because I changed two things at once and I have one week of data. I cannot attribute the drop to the algorithm; the daily limit on its own explains a good share of it.
What I can say is that both features had been sitting on my phone for months, neither was switched on, and both were three submenus away. It took me four minutes to find them and my usage fell to a quarter.
Why that is not enough
There is a catch, documented since Instagram brought back chronological order in 2022: if you choose Following, leave the app and come back, the app puts you straight back on the algorithmic feed.
The choice is not saved, so you have to make it again every time, several times a day, forever. That is not an option, it is a chore designed to wear you down.
There is an economic reason for the button being buried and there is nothing mysterious about it: the algorithmic feed holds attention longer than the chronological one, and attention is what gets sold.
No company puts the button that shrinks its own advertising inventory up front.
What Australia proposes
That is where the Australian draft comes in, requiring platforms to offer every user over 16 the option to switch off the algorithmic feed and see only the content of the accounts they follow, and to actively tell them the option exists instead of burying it in a submenu.
It does not cover only social media, because it also reaches artificial intelligence chatbots, gaming platforms, apps and messaging services.
A draft in targeted consultation, not an approved law. The government opened comments from platforms, industry, civil society and advocacy groups before taking it to Parliament this year.
The line Albanese used to introduce it sums up the whole argument: this is not about giving government control, it is about giving people control.
The comparison he reached for is worth keeping, because it dismantles the idea that regulating the internet is somehow strange: just as there are basic safety standards for cars, toys or food, the duty of care applies basic standards to the products we use online every day.
That is the difference between a feature and a right, and it is exactly what Australia is trying to legislate.
A feature is given by the company when it feels like it, hidden where it likes and reversed when it suits. A right forces them to ask you, to respect your answer, and to pay 109 million if they do not.
The false choice
The strongest objection to this law does not come from the platforms, it comes from the people who have studied these systems for years and have spent that time asking for them to be regulated.
In March 2025, the Knight-Georgetown Institute published a report called Better Feeds, signed by some fifteen researchers and technologists, among them Luke Thorburn, of the safe and trusted artificial intelligence centre at King's College London, Jonathan Stray, of Berkeley, and Arvind Narayanan, of Princeton.
Their central argument is that asking people to choose between the engagement-optimised feed and the chronological one is a false choice, because the design space for optimising a recommender system is vast and nobody is using it.
The report notes that some policymakers have turned to banning personalisation or promoting chronological feeds, and argues that many better alternatives exist.
There is a practical reason behind that: the chronological feed is not neutral either. It rewards whoever posts most often, it favours volume above everything else, and it can be gamed too, just through a different mechanism. Choosing between the algorithm and the clock is not much of a choice.
To which you have to add what has been measured: when offered it, most people do not choose the chronological feed. Instagram brought it back in 2022 and uptake was minimal. You can have the law, the button and the fine, and almost everyone stays exactly where they were.
What that group proposes instead is something else: not two options but several, the ability to choose what your feed optimises for rather than just switching it off, and the possibility of a third party offering you its own ranking over the same content.
The reason none of that exists yet is simple: it is not a technical limitation, it is that nobody has required it. They call it a policy failure, not a technology one.
Both things can be true at once. A reform that offers only the clock as an alternative falls short, and a country with no rules at all is left with nothing.
Australia is at least arguing about which of the two it wants. Here we are not yet arguing about either.
Here
In Bolivia we spend three hours and twenty-six minutes a day on social media, an hour more than the world average, and nine million of us are online.
We have no personal data protection law, no rules on digital political advertising, nothing resembling a duty of care, so nobody is required to ask you how you want to look at your own phone.
What Australia is debating is the same question running through everything we have been publishing: who decides the order of what you see, and whether that decision is yours or belongs to the company that profits from your time.
In an election campaign, that same question decides which candidate exists for you and which one never appears on your screen at all.
Until a law arrives, the button exists and you can use it today, even if you have to press it every single time.
Switching to Following changes what you see in thirty seconds. It is little, and it is all there is until somebody forces them to ask us.
Sources
- Government of Australia, draft Digital Duty of Care legislation released on September 8, 2026 for targeted consultation, and statements by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, reported by SCC Online, Reuters and Australian outlets: the My Feed, My Way initiative, its reach across social media, chatbots, gaming, apps and messaging, the obligation to notify users of the option, oversight by the eSafety Commissioner and penalties of up to 109.2 million Australian dollars.
- Coverage from 2024 and 2025 of the Digital Duty of Care framework announced by the Australian government and of the law restricting social media access for under-16s, the direct precedent for this proposal.
- Public documentation from Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, X and YouTube on chronological feeds, Following tabs, content preferences, resetting suggested content and pausing history, verified in September 2026.
- Coverage from 2022 of the return of the chronological feed to Instagram and of the app's behaviour, which reverts to the algorithmic feed on reopening.
- Instagram's announcement of the Your Algorithm feature, December 2025, and coverage of its extension to Explore in April 2026 and to the main feed in June 2026: the AI-generated interest summary, topic adjustment, labelling of where each recommendation came from, and statements by VP of product Tessa Lyons and head of Instagram Adam Mosseri.
- The author's own screenshots of Instagram's Your Algorithm and Time management screens, taken in September 2026.
- Better Feeds: Algorithms That Put People First, Knight-Georgetown Institute, March 2025, signed among others by Luke Thorburn, Jonathan Stray, Arvind Narayanan, Aviv Ovadya, Ravi Iyer and Jeff Allen: the argument on the false choice between engagement-optimised and chronological feeds, the breadth of the available design space, and the framing of the problem as a policy failure rather than a technological one.
- DataReportal, Digital 2025 report on Bolivia: nine million internet users and three hours twenty-six minutes daily on social media.
The usage figures cited in the first-person section come from the app's time management screen on the author's phone and cover a single week of measurements. The author changed two settings simultaneously, so the drop cannot be attributed to either one alone, and the text states as much. The Australian proposal is a draft in consultation and not an approved law, and its content may change before it reaches Parliament. The menu routes for each app correspond to September 2026 and platforms change them frequently, so they are worth checking at the moment of use. The reading of the economic incentives behind the algorithmic feed is interpretive.
