The debate over social media feeds is once again at the center of political and industry discussions in Australia. The government led by Anthony Albanese has announced its intention to require platforms to offer an explicit choice: keep a feed sorted by recommendations or switch to content from followed accounts in reverse chronological order. For Instagram, however, the second option would not automatically translate into a simpler or more user-friendly experience.
Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, argued that a widespread departure from ranking systems would ultimately make feeds more crowded with commercial posts. His argument is that, in a pure chronological setup, visibility depends primarily on posting frequency: a mechanism that rewards accounts with more resources, from businesses to brands, while leaving less room for creators and personal contacts.
It is a stance that comes as public debate tends to equate a return to chronological order with greater control, transparency, and freedom of choice. Mosseri did not directly comment on the Australian government's plan, but his statements clearly outline Instagram's position: ranking is imperfect and often perceived as opaque, yet for the platform it serves to distribute attention among content that, without filters, would compete solely on posting volume.
The Australian proposal and the right to choose the feed
The initiative announced by Labor is part of a broader package of measures targeting online harms. In the case of social media, the idea is to compel services to ask users which mode they prefer: a feed organized around platform-recommended content or a reverse chronological sequence of accounts they already follow.
The distinction is not merely technical. A recommended feed uses interaction and behavioral signals to decide which posts to display and in what position. A reverse chronological feed, on the other hand, primarily follows the time of publication: the latest content uploaded by followed accounts tends to appear first. In the first model, the service selects and ranks; in the second, it reduces this curation activity, but does not necessarily eliminate all platform design choices.
The Australian plan aims precisely to make this difference understandable and actionable. The demand for an opt-out stems from the idea that social media users should be able to remove algorithmic recommendations from their feed without having to leave the service. The methods, timeline, and details of any potential requirement remain to be defined, but the announcement brings back to the forefront an issue that has long lingered in the background: is control over the feed an optional feature or an essential condition of the digital experience?
Why Instagram considers chronological order a problem
According to Mosseri, only a very vocal minority is calling for a permanent return to reverse chronological order. The reason given is tied to incentives. If getting more views mainly depends on posting more frequently, professional and business accounts can boost their presence with a consistency that regular users can hardly match. Friends, the executive noted, tend to post less than creators, and creators post less than brands and businesses.
The outcome anticipated by Instagram is a feed where branded content becomes more prevalent and harder to ignore. Hence Mosseri's warning: users might feel overwhelmed by commercial posts and lose interest in the app. If time spent on the platform drops, so does the audience available to anyone seeking attention and visibility, from creators to companies themselves.
It is a line of reasoning that ties the perceived quality of the experience to the attention economy. Under this interpretation, ranking is not merely a way to boost engagement: it also acts as a corrective to the imbalance between those who can produce a high volume of content and those who post sporadically. Naturally, this corrective measure is defined and managed by the very company that sets the rules of distribution, and this is precisely where much of the criticism directed at algorithmic feeds is centered.
Instagram does not hide that the system has limitations. Mosseri acknowledged that ranking mechanisms make mistakes and tend to optimize for what can be easily measured, neglecting aspects that are harder to quantify. For the user, this gap between collected signals, evaluation criteria, and the final outcome can take the form of a black box: content appears or disappears from the feed without the reason always being clear.
More transparency, but without relinquishing control over ranking
The statements came on the occasion of the Australian launch of Algo Confessions, an initiative that Instagram presents as a tool to explain how recommendations work. Australia is the first country, after the United States, to host the project, which involves celebrities and influencers describing how the content shown in the feed is selected.
The platform's message is that people already have several tools to influence recommendations by adjusting settings, preferences, and tags. This approach differs from the one outlined by the Australian government. Instagram proposes gradual control within a ranking system that remains active; Labor's proposal, by contrast, aims to also provide a structural alternative—namely, a recommendation-free view in the feed of followed accounts.
The difference matters because it alters both the user's power and the platform's. Adjusting preferences, indicating interests, or removing unwanted items allows users to influence the result, but does not provide access to the criteria the system uses to make decisions. Choosing a chronological feed, on the other hand, means limiting the weight of ranking on part of the experience from the outset. It does not solve every problem, nor does it guarantee a more useful feed for everyone, but it makes explicit a choice that many services today treat as the default.
For creators, publishers, and businesses, the potential spread of chronological feeds would have concrete consequences. Strategies based on posting at the right time and with greater frequency could gain importance, while discovery mechanisms driven by recommendations would lose weight. For users, the choice could turn into a compromise between two models: on the one hand, a sequence more faithful to personally selected accounts; on the other, a feed that promises greater relevance but requires trust in the service's criteria.
Instagram insists that an indiscriminate return to chronological order could reduce satisfaction and app usage. Australia, with its plan, does not seem to want to impose a single model on everyone, however: it wants to make the alternative available. The next step will be understanding how this principle will be translated into binding rules and whether other platforms and governments will follow the same path. For now, the debate highlights a tension that is difficult to eliminate: automated selection can ease an overloaded flow of content, but it also concentrates a decisive share of online visibility in the hands of platforms.
