Consent advocate Chanel Contos is urging the federal government to pursue an opt-in for algorithmic social media feeds because it will be “too easy” for tech giants to design their way around weaker reforms.
Ms Contos made the case for reining in harmful algorithms, which she said were exposing young people to misogynistic manosphere content and fuelling the prevalence of sexual violence in Australia, during a speech to the National Press Club in Canberra today.
She laid out a vision where all Australians would be given the “choice” to turn algorithms on in their feeds, but the “default” experience would be akin to retro 2016-era social media.
In this version of the platforms, users would see posts in chronological order, and only from people or accounts they chose to follow.
Explore-type pages that recommend content would be based on a broad national average, rather than hyper-personalised material determined by the individual’s scrolling habits.
“I think political will is the only thing stopping us getting over the line,” she said.
Ms Contos said having an on-off switch for algorithms put power into users’ hands and could act as a “safety net” for people to fall back on as social media continues to evolve in the future.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has flagged support for giving Australians more control over the content they are served online but has stopped short of backing the algorithm opt-in model proposed by Ms Contos.
“In response to community concern about the impact of algorithms, we are considering options to ensure people have greater control over what they receive on their devices,” Mr Albanese said.
Anthony Albanese says Australians should have more control over what they see on their devices but has not backed an opt-in model. (ABC News: Matt Roberts)
In her speech, Ms Contos argued an opt-out system for algorithms would be a “first step” and congratulated the government for seeking to address the issue.
“However, opt-in algorithms would fundamentally make the transition onto social media for 16-year-olds and other children safer, and it would bring the principle of affirmative consent to our screens,” she said.
“This is crucial, and the detail in any reform will determine its success.”
Algorithms are the automated systems used by social media platforms to decide which posts, videos and other content a user sees and in what order, based on factors such as their behaviour and apparent interests.
Ms Contos, who is the founder and chief executive of advocacy group Teach Us Consent, launched the “fix our feeds” campaign, which calls for the government to mandate an “opt-in” for algorithms, in December last year.
Labor has since indicated an interest in addressing the broader issue to further complement its laws banning Australians aged under 16 from holding any social media account.
Communications Minister Anika Wells said “deliberately opaque” algorithmic recommender systems had allowed social media companies to influence Australian culture “for better or worse”.
“Online harm has real-world consequences,” she said.
“If we want to prevent harm, we must fix platforms that reward it.”
Anika Wells says social media companies are influencing Australian culture via algorithm-driven recommendations. (ABC News: Ian Cutmore)
Consent education ‘not an attack on men and boys’
Asked about the manosphere, Nationals leader Matt Canavan had said he understood the “fury” but suggested boys were driven to that content by the “feminisation” of the school curriculum.
“I think we’ve got to have a deep, hard look of why young boys are attracted to this stuff online,” he said.
“It is terrible. It is toxic. But … a big reason for that, in my view, is they’re sick and tired of getting lectures about how bad men are at school, and so they go to other places.”
Senator Canavan said a solution might be more male role models in schools, including teachers.
“I just worry some of the solutions here don’t really understand what goes in a young boy’s mind,” he said.
Ms Contos said there was a “missing piece of the puzzle” in Senator Canavan’s view, which was that boys and men did not naturally “want” to engage in misogynistic content and were instead pushed there by profit-driven algorithms.
“There is a much bigger system at play than small conversations in school and that sort of thing,” she said.
“It is a multi-billion-dollar industry right now profiting off making young boys and men feel like they need to aspire to be something that is almost wholly unrealistic and then telling them the fact you haven’t gotten here is because of these issues, usually one of them involves women or misogynistic rhetoric around that.”
Ms Contos said the Australian national curriculum in 2022 introduced consent education in a gender neutral way that gave students the opportunity to periodically talk about their own boundaries.
“This content is ultimately to promote healthy intimacy and to reduce violence. It is absolutely not an attack on men and boys at all,” she said.
“But we need to hold all that while acknowledging that sexual violence is majority perpetrated by boys and men and that shouldn’t be shameful for the individual, but it should mean they are willing to be part of the system to change that statistic.”
Digital duty of care next on Labor’s agenda
Ms Wells has been developing a digital duty of care, which would be a legal obligation on online platforms to proactively identify and reduce foreseeable risks of harm to their users.
It reverses the current situation that relies mainly on users reporting harmful content after something has gone wrong.
An exposure draft of the legislation is due to be released later this month, with Ms Contos describing the “overall strength” of those reforms as “critical” to their success.
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“It is too easy for big tech to design schemes that appear as structural reform but actually suit them just fine,” she said.
In her speech, Ms Contos linked algorithm-driven harm to the “uphill battle” schools are facing in their attempts to teach consent to young students.
Ms Contos said a yearly class had “little hope” of changing the attitudes responsible for the current culture of sexual violence in schools while an “addictive content producing machine” simultaneously targeted teens with a “contradictory message”.
Ms Contos said a yearly class had “little hope” of changing the attitudes responsible for the current culture of sexual violence in schools. (ABC News: Callum Flinn )
How algorithms fuel the manosphere
She outlined how “manosphere” is not simply a broad term describing online communities that hold male supremacy ideologies, but a money-making venture facilitated by algorithms.
Ms Contos said young men online seeking community, belonging or self-improvement advice are “targeted” with content that blames women for their “misfortune”.
Sexual abuse and assault support services:1800 Respect national helpline: 1800 737 732Lifeline (24-hour Crisis Line): 131 114Victims of Crime Helpline: 1800 819 817Blue Knot: 1300 657 380
This content also reinstates “harmful and outdated” gender roles, like the idea women should not leave the house without their male partner, hold jobs or earn their own money.
“Boys and men have valid concerns about the economy, and their relationships with partners and friends,” she said.
“From these concerns, an industry has jumped onto a market opportunity, and unfortunately, misogyny is at the heart of its business model.”
Ms Contos described how young men engaging in “harmless” workout or motivational videos are “very quickly” served content promoting the idea that emotional control, material wealth and dominance “especially over women” are “markers of male wealth”.
She pointed to research showing men who subscribe to those sorts of beliefs are twice as likely to binge-drink, six times as likely to problem gamble and eight times as likely to have suicidal thoughts.
They are also 17 times more likely to have hit their partner, according to the Man Box study.