There has rightly been a lot of talk this week about what Australia’s teenagers see and do online.

Bullying, body image issues, and violence against women and girls are problems that have taken on a whole new shape through social media.

Data out last week from researchers at three Australian universities also found that, aside from family and friends, social media is the main source of news for 13-17 year olds, with 41 per cent getting news from AI too.

In this respect, the kids aren’t too different from the rest of us. The 2026 Digital News Report found that for the first time, more Australians were getting their news from social media than from news sites directly.

This means it is social media platforms and their algorithms that increasingly control what news stories get seen, and by whom.

That is why I say that the government’s shake up of social media algorithms as part of its Digital Duty of Care, announced this week, is not just for the kids. If done right, it has the potential to ward off serious threats to our democracy.

A teenager who turns 16 today and signs up to social media will most likely be old enough to vote come our next federal election, due by May 2028.

It’s fair to say their fellow gen Z voters – as well as most of gen X and Y and a good chunk of boomers – will have had their political views shaped to a large degree by what is served up in their social media feed.

The problem is, the algorithms that determine what we see in our feeds are not designed to give us a common body of knowledge, shared frames of reference, or windows into the lives of our fellow citizens.

They are designed to keep eyes glued to screens as long as possible, and social media platforms know the best glue is content that provokes outrage and division, herding users into siloes and echo chambers.

Under the government’s proposed changes, users would have the option to turn the algorithm off. We could still individually choose to receive algorithmic recommendations if and when we wished, but if we wanted to say “I don’t want big overseas tech companies determining what I see today”, we would have that ability.  

Freedom of speech should rightly be protected in a democracy, and as another commentator has written on this site, giving users more control over what they are shown actually moves us further away from censorship.

Others have observed that an algorithm off-switch would mean reverting to the way things were before, when our feeds were full of our friends and family and the sources of information we intentionally chose to follow.

When I voted in a federal election for the first time, Facebook was just taking off in Australia, but it was more commonly used as a space for digital camera photo dumps and “poking” your friends than news and politics.

Our sources of news were not perfect, and most of us probably chose newspapers, TV, radio and fledgling news websites that were somewhat reflective of our political leanings.

But the sources of information in news stories were generally clear, journalists had usually spoken to multiple sources and there were editors to check facts and question assumptions.  

There is also a code of conduct for journalists, and Australians can raise complaints about news outlets with the Australian Press Council. There are currently no basic standards to hold big tech to account in the same way.

Back then, the ads that surrounded news – whether in the papers or in the ad breaks on commercial radio and TV – were not peppered with scams and AI deepfakes of politicians. This trust-eroding slop degrades the credibility of even the reputable content it shares a newsfeed with.

There is still a lot of high-quality news and journalism being shared on social media, but it competes with content designed to provoke the addictive outrage that algorithms favour.

When real news does make it into the feed, many users do not even know what to trust anymore.

The threat to democracy cuts both ways – people might believe anything, but people might also start to believe nothing.

Without trust in one another and a shared foundation of knowledge from which we form our diverse opinions, democracy cannot function.’

Attempts to make social media safer and give users more control must go hand in hand with improvements to civics education and media literacy, to equip people with the tools to scrutinise political information, assess what is fact, and make up their own minds. 

According to the 2026 News and Young Australians report out last week, only 36 per cent of 13-17 year olds said they had learnt anything at school in the past year about how algorithms impact the news they see online.

While many adults may struggle to explain that too, for gen Z and gen Alpha (born 2021-2025), this kind of knowledge will be the basis for understanding their world.

In the early days of social media there was a lot of enthusiasm about its potential to strengthen democracy – as a digital town square where everyday people could more easily participate in politics.

The monetisation of tech platforms soon quashed hopes of this democratic digital utopia.

But by introducing some basic standards and rules for big tech, including the requirement that they hand some control back to users, the 16 year olds of today have more chance of being informed and empathetic when they stand at the ballot box in 2028.

The rest of us might be too.

Tom Mooney is campaign director of Democracy Counts