Opposing Algorithmic Choice Legislation While Acknowledging Algorithms Are "Black Boxes": Meta's Internal Contradiction in Australia's Regulatory Standoff

According to ABC News Australia, Instagram head Adam Mosseri told regulators at a media briefing held in Australia this week that if ordinary users disabled the algorithmic feed and switched to chronological browsing, platform engagement could fall by as much as 50%.

"If you go to a chronological feed, it ends up getting overwhelmed with content from companies, brands, and publishers. Creators get drowned out, and then your friends get drowned out even more," Mosseri said at the briefing. He explained that in chronological mode, frequently posting companies and brands would dominate users' screens, drowning out content from ordinary users.

The remarks came in the same week that Australia's federal government unveiled a legislative proposal. According to ABC News Australia, the proposal would require large social platforms to give users, via push notification, the option to turn off algorithmic feeds and switch to chronological timelines, with non-compliance punishable by fines of up to A$100 million. It forms part of the long-mulled "Digital Duty of Care" framework. Mosseri declined in the briefing to directly comment on the government proposal, but according to ABC News Australia, he volunteered his assessment of chronological feeds.

More telling is the logical tension exposed in the same briefing. While warning that leaving the algorithm would damage the "user experience," Mosseri acknowledged that the algorithm controlling that experience is, by nature, a "black box" that users cannot peer into.

"What we are trying to figure out now is how do we bring back more agency, bring back more transparency, bring back more control?" he said when asked how the algorithm operates.

"Anything that isn't the default just doesn't get used the majority of the time, which is why defaults are so important," he added. The remark serves both as an explanation for the low take-up of the chronological option within Meta's own product, and as a tacit acknowledgment of regulators' push for "discoverability of non-default options."

According to ABC News Australia, Meta has been compelled to cede such control in other jurisdictions on multiple occasions. Since 2023, the EU's 27 member states have required large platforms such as Instagram to give users the chronological option; in October 2025, a Dutch court went further, ruling that platforms must set chronological feeds as the default rather than burying them as a discoverable setting. Australia's "My Feed, My Way" proposal sits on the extension of this international trend, and its timing coincides with Meta's US$23 billion settlement in the United States last month, which, according to ABC News Australia, directly helped propel the issue into the spotlight in Australia.

That lawsuit, brought by 29 US states, accused Meta of deliberately designing its platforms to be addictive for teenagers. One of the settlement terms requires Meta to allow teenage users in the US to choose chronological feeds. A company that has paid US$23 billion to settle allegations of deliberately addictive design for minors now invokes "user experience" to oppose giving adult users the same choice — a stance that itself constitutes a rebuttal of its own argument.

It is worth noting that Instagram already offers a chronological option under its "Following" mode globally, including in Australia. According to ABC News Australia, Mosseri acknowledged that actual take-up of that option among Australian users is only "low single-digit percentages," but he himself conceded that the figure was an educated guess made in the absence of data rather than an official company statistic. He attributed the low usage to poor discoverability rather than deliberate concealment, and said there was "definitely room to improve." Yet, while conceding the discoverability flaws, the company is opposing forced push notifications alerting users to the existence of that very option.

When asked whether Instagram is addictive, Mosseri argued that the everyday usage of "addictive" differs from "addictive in the clinical sense," even though the US$23 billion settlement has already amounted to a substantive response to the related product-design allegations.

According to publicly available information, Mosseri's claim that engagement could fall by 50% after disabling the algorithm was offered without supporting data or methodology; the "low single-digit percentage" figure for Australian chronological-feed take-up is Mosseri's own guess and lacks any official basis; the scope and enforcement details of the Dutch court's October 2025 ruling have not been elaborated; and Australia's "My Feed, My Way" bill remains a proposal, with its passage and final terms still uncertain.