Mobile phone with WeChat app on the screen — SOPA Images/Getty

What might turning off the algorithm look like? Chinese social media provides some hints

Authosr Fan Yang, LUke Heemsbergen & Robbie Fordyce
Date 15 October 2026

The Albanese government has introduced its digital duty of care legislation to parliament today. The bill includes an “off switch” to allow social media users to opt out of recommender algorithms.

If passed, Australians could choose to switch off their algorithmic recommendation and consume a news feed populated by the accounts they subscribe to. It’s been welcomed by online safety advocates.

The bill echoes a model that one of the world’s largest platforms has run for more than a decade: WeChat in China.

Its long experience offers Australia an preview of what a feed unshackled from algorithms might look like. It’s not all good news.

What is WeChat?

The Chinese platform WeChat was launched in 2011 and now has one billion users globally, making it one of the primary social media services for Chinese-speakers worldwide.

The platform’s design logic was simple. WeChat was meant to be an efficiency tool. Unlike its American or Chinese counterparts, which used algorithmic recommendations to keep users on the platform, WeChat is designed for users to open the app, do what they need, close the app and put their phone away.

Algorithmic curation played a minimal role until the introduction of the short-video function “Channels” launched in 2021 to compete with Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) and RedNote (Xiaohongshu) in the rising short-video market.

Yet, WeChat largely remains focused on efficiency.

Instead of trying to hold user attention for as long as possible, WeChat is a “super app” that offers a suite of services including finance, commerce, publication, entertainment, and communications within a single platform to make it integral to people’s lives.

It’s all about the clicks

WeChat’s news feature lists stories published by “Official Accounts”, or content creators. Users only see content they follow.

Our research project, RECapture, has studied Official Accounts targeting Chinese-Australians since 2019. Our data offer a longitudinal study of monitored content.

We found the absence of algorithmic curation gives publishers significant autonomy to generate revenue independently of the app.

But within the platform itself, creators still fiercely compete for user attention. This is because users search for content they’re interested in and subscribe to accounts they find most compelling, which means subscribed accounts compete with one another for user attention within that pool.

This competition has manifested as increased publication speed. Outlets, restricted by their own budgets, produce low-quality, clickbait content, often compiled from multiple fragmented and unverified sources, to attract subscribers and maximise user engagement.

Increasingly, this race is further accelerated by the use of generative artificial intelligence (AI).

The logic is simple: publish early and often; the clicks roll in throughout the day. Hit the right publication timing, the so-called “golden window”, and clicks spike further. Run a striking headline, and clicks climb yet again. This is the strategy to maximise a publisher’s chances of appearing in a user’s search query and capturing their attention.

It’s clicks, clicks, clicks (or taps) that matter, as this is the metric to attract eyes to advertisements, and therefore money to the platform.

If the digital duty of care legislation passes in Australia and enough people choose to opt out of algorithms, we might see a similar increase in poor quality content here.

It’s also possible the laws won’t deliver what they promise. This is because we don’t really know how digital platforms curate users’ subscribed content. We need the platforms to be more transparent about this.

My feed, my responsibility?

Under the promise of giving Australians more control over their online environment, the government effectively offloads its responsibility of care onto individual users.

Exposure to harmful content implicitly becomes a consequence of the user’s failure to switch off their algorithm. This could let tech companies off the hook.

The legislation also reads as a compromised version of the abandoned Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill.

Rather than tasking law enforcement bodies with addressing the issue (which risked being entangled in freedom-of-speech debates), the government instead leaves citizens to manage the problems themselves.

The government knows the product harms. So, it is making sure to protect the children through the under-16 social media ban, even while individualising choices for harmful digital products for everybody else.

Getting to the root cause

The Australian government has started viewing digital platforms more critically, which is a welcome change from laissez faire attitudes of the past.

However, the government tends to understand digital platforms as a bunch of functions and tools rather than products of technology business entities, with which the government nonetheless continues to do deals.

This means the government operates on the assumption that switching off the “bad” ones, cutting off access, or introducing surveillance systems is a straightforward solution to the problems that we face in our digital environment.

What this view overlooks is that harm stems from the business model of tech companies. As long as that business model remains unchanged, harms will not disappear.

Being able to opt out of the algorithm will not shift the business model of content creators for the Australian market. And how the platforms themselves navigate this remains to be seen.

And, while the government’s legislation focuses on the problems of social media over the past decade or so, the emerging potential harms from the same big tech firms’ AI products loom.

It seems the government’s advocacy for a duty of care only extends to areas where the stakes are currently low, exhausted or no longer a priority for industry to make money from.

Fan Yang, Research Fellow at Melbourne Law School and ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making Society, The University of Melbourne; Luke Heemsbergen, Senior Lecturer in Communication, Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University, and Robbie Fordyce, Senior Lecturer, Communications and Media Studies, Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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