The US government says Australia's push to let people opt out of social media algorithms amounts to censorship.
Australia has proposed a law that would let people switch off the algorithms that curate what they see on social media and other platforms. The US government has pushed back, describing the proposal as censorship rather than a consumer safeguard. The disagreement puts Washington and Canberra at odds over a policy that has not yet been passed into law. Details of exactly how the opt-out would work have not been made public.
The dispute matters because opt-out and censorship describe two very different things, and the label a government chooses shapes how the public reads a policy. Calling a user-choice feature censorship is a stretch when the mechanism in question would only give people more control over what they see, not less. It is also notable that a foreign government is weighing in on another country's domestic tech legislation before it is even finalized.
Whether the bill passes intact remains to be seen, but for now the loudest objection is coming from outside Australia's borders, not from within them.