Questions of consent and privacy aren’t the ones we should be asking about social media

OpinionColumnist, author and academicSeptember 4, 2026 — 5:00amSeptember 4, 2026 — 5:00amThings seemed so much better in Back to the Future II. Technology meant sneakers with power laces and auto-adjusting, auto-drying jackets. It meant hoverboards and hologram ads. It meant hi-tech sunglasses that allowed people to watch television shows in them or answer video phone calls. That last one is close to the bone. When we got hi-tech sunnies, we ended up calling them “pervert glasses” because people started using them to film people without their knowledge, including in various states of undress.From there, things only get darker. The focus this week has been the ravages of the algorithm that drives our social media apps, that harvests rich data about us, and keeps feeding us ever more extreme content to keep us scrolling: that is the basis of their business model. If you needed a horrific illustration, you need only look back a fortnight, when a 16-year-old girl died, strangled during sex in an act increasingly being depicted in internet pornography.Opting out of social media doesn’t necessarily free us.Simon LetchAnd if you need an instructive one, it came even more recently, when Meta reached a US$18 billion ($25 billion) settlement in a US court, fleeing from allegations it knows and conceals the damage its products do to children. Meta agreed to add all kinds of controls and limits to its apps for children: daily time limits, blackouts after midnight, stricter content controls. We’ll see in the long run what that means.It’s not right to call this a moment. It’s a culmination. For years, we’ve heard of the connection between social media platforms and bullying, mental illness and suicide. For years, whether here or in America, we’ve seen no serious attempt at doing anything about it. In that respect, the Albanese government’s teen social media ban was a political watershed, even if it hasn’t yet proven to be a practical one.For now, all we see are the feverish efforts of politics and the law to respond. Not so much to the glasses, I should add. This week the Albanese government resisted popular calls to ban them, leaving it instead to places such as pools, gyms and childcare centres to enforce their own rules. But the government is clearly trying to muscle up on social media. That, too, was gloriously absent from Back to the Future II. No one was staring miserably into phones. That film’s wholesome vision was instead that we’d have a fax machine in every room. If only.The latest idea is to legislate a “right to erasure”. This would give you a legal right to request that the tech companies delete the data they hold on you, which in turn would dilute the effect, and we’d hope the ravages, of their algorithms. Here, it picks up an idea the European Union has had for a decade with mixed results. Millions have successfully requested their data be deleted, and some companies have been fined for failing to do so. But sometimes deleting this information from all the layers of back-ups has proven technically too difficult. And after all that, European children are still committing suicide, and their parents are still pursuing the tech companies in the courts over it.Meanwhile, our federal government faces pressure to legislate our right to algorithm-free social media. The most vibrant campaign – fully expressed when Chanel Contos addressed the National Press Club this week – wants algorithms to be opt in, so that social media apps have them off by default. A lesser position, again in the EU, takes an opt-in approach, so the algorithm is on unless you switch it off. My reading of the government’s body language is they’ll follow the EU here, too.But whatever policies prevail, there’s a problem. The common thread running through all these ideas is that they treat this issue ultimately as one of individual rights. Perhaps it’s the right to privacy – to have one’s data erased. Or it’s the right to choose whether your algorithm is on, whether by opting in or out. That is, they resort to all the familiar touchstones of our political culture – choice, contract, consent – and presume the answer to our ills lies somewhere there.But that presumes the injury here is to the individual person whose individual private information might be used against his or her individual preferences or interests. And that is not the heart of the problem here. The problem is not individual. It is social. The damage does not show up merely, or even mostly, in the life of the person whose data is being harvested. It shows up in our shared lives. The damage is to our interactions with each other, our democratic lives, even – as we’ve tragically seen – our sexual lives.Algorithms rely on immense data collection – nothing short of mass, digital surveillance. That data gives tech companies unbelievable power. They can, and have, manipulated our emotions. They can, in a similar way, hack our democracy by selling that data to political campaigns. To do these things, they don’t need data on every single one of us. Aggregate data is enough. You can opt out of your algorithm or get your own data erased if you like. But unless everyone else follows your lead, you’ll still be living in a world beset with all the ills that define this crisis. The polarisation, the extremism, the pornography, it will continue more or less uninterrupted.We can, if we like, try to work around all this. To hope that something like an opt-in method might lead to a critical mass of people who don’t bother, who live life without the algorithm, and that this delivers something closer to a pre-algorithmic world. The Albanese government is working on what it calls a digital duty of care, and it’s possible that might force tech companies into making a more responsible product.Or we can observe something bigger: no one has yet explained why this vast data-harvesting machine should exist in the first place. All the arguments for it are about individual preferences or private profits. But none is about the common good. Once the argument is transferred to that ground, it changes fundamentally to one the tech companies lose. But we don’t do this, because it’s now such an unfamiliar script for how we do policy. So we stick with the familiar lines. We’re working valiantly, if belatedly with them, and I admire those who do. But the problem remains that we’re trapped in the tech companies’ film.Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist. His Quarterly Essay, which expands on the ideas in this column, will be published on Monday.The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up here.Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.From our partners