Australia is preparing a law to allow users to deactivate personalized feeds on social media. But will going back to the chronological feed really improve our experience or will it just make us more bored?
Opening Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and simply seeing the posts in the order in which they were published, without software deciding which deserve to appear first, could soon become a concrete choice for millions of people. The Australian government is in fact preparing a law that will force social networks to allow users to deactivate the algorithmic selection of content.
In practice, instead of receiving a flow built on the basis of your tastes, previous interactions and what the system deems most capable of attracting attention, you could return to a chronological feed, where the most recent posts simply appear first. The goal is to give users more control and reduce the automatic amplification of extreme, provocative or content designed to arouse anger and reactions. But would such a move, which would also be equivalent to going back to the dawn of social media, really improve our experience? The answer is less obvious than it seems.
Born to manage information overload
Recommendation algorithms were created above all to solve a practical problem: as the number of friends, pages and accounts followed increased, the available content became too much to read them all. Already in 2014, Facebook explained that, every time a person opened the News Feed, there could be on average around 1,500 posts potentially viewable. By showing them only in temporal order, many updates considered important would inevitably have ended up too low.
The system then began to assign a sort of priority to each piece of content based on numerous signals, such as who had posted it, how often the user interacted with that person or page, and how much that type of post had attracted their attention in the past. According to Facebook, in this way the share of content actually read went from 57 to 70%.
Today, however, the mechanism has become much more sophisticated: on platforms such as TikTok or Instagram it is not even necessary to follow an account for its videos to be proposed, if the algorithm believes they may be of interest.
The attention trap and the “rage bait” phenomenon
The problem is that “interesting” for an algorithm does not necessarily mean useful, reliable or pleasant for the user. Platforms earn above all when those who use them stay on the app longer, and therefore recommendation systems tend to favor what generates reactions. Anger, indignation, fear, and conflict can be especially effective in getting a person to stop, comment, or share.
This is where the so-called comes from rage baitcontent specifically constructed to cause irritation and multiply interactions.
Eliminating algorithmic selection could therefore reduce the automatic diffusion of these posts and give greater weight back to the people you voluntarily chose to follow. However, this possibility would not erase either misinformation or the so-called echo chambers: even a strictly chronological feed, in fact, can be filled with very similar content if the user only follows people who think like him. And without filters the original problem would return, that is, an avalanche of posts among which it becomes difficult to find the really interesting ones.
Less engaging
The experiments conducted over the years by Meta indicate that, when the algorithmic ranking is replaced by a chronological order, the contents displayed, but also likes and comments decrease: for a social network this is an undesirable result, because it means less time spent on the platform and therefore fewer opportunities to show advertising. From the user’s point of view, however, this could be the advantage: a feed less capable of predicting what will make the thumb stop on the screen would make continuous scrolling less irresistible, turning the experience back into something you want to do, rather than remaining in an environment designed to hold your attention.
Australia, which has already introduced a ban on access for children under 16, could thus become an enormous large-scale experiment, and the reform could help us understand something even more interesting: whether a social network that manages to involve us less is really worse or whether it simply gives us back at least part of the time we give it today. Assuming we still know what to do with it.
