The Opt-in Algorithm

Did we choose for our young people to be raised, in part, by algorithms? Can we still set the terms?

Australia has now gone further than most, and it came not from a department but from a campaign.

Chanel Contos takes us inside how her team, a small youth-led charity, moved the Australian government to commit to algorithm choice and a digital duty of care. Baroness Beeban Kidron has watched a dozen governments receive campaigns like it, and lays out the playbook that comes next: the lobbyists, the court cases and what she calls a failure of political imagination.

Both saw what they could not unsee. For Chanel, research showing teenage boys holding more misogynistic attitudes than men in their seventies, served to them rather than sought. For Beeban, four fifteen-year-old girls in her kitchen, not talking, locked to a screen.

They both make clear that the technology is not itself bad, it’s poorly designed for reasons of profit, and that design can be changed. Treat these as products and product law follows: safety, liability, consumer protection. The two levers still in our hands, our attention and our vote, are how we give the next generation a childhood that is theirs to shape.