‘Social media companies will hate it. Stuff them’: Premier backs algorithm escape for young people

September 4, 2026 — 5:00amMumbai: Premier Chris Minns has thrown his support behind a proposal to allow users to quit social media algorithms and has a warning for tech companies that resist: “Stuff them.”Minns has also backed calls to ban depictions of strangulation in pornography, saying young people’s access to violent sexual imagery was “the problem of our times”, as an urgent roundtable involving all three school sectors is convened on Friday following a spate of alleged sexual assaults by Sydney schoolboys.NSW Premier Chris Minns, who is currently in India on a trade mission, threw his support behind a ban on depictions of strangulation in pornography.Michael McGowanFederal Social Services Minister Tanya Plibersek on Sunday said Australia should look “very seriously” at following the UK by banning any depictions of strangulation or suffocation in pornography. It followed the death of a 16-year-old Sydney girl, understood to be treated as a suspected sexual choking act.While he conceded he was not familiar with the technical elements of the UK ban, Minns, who is in Mumbai on a four-day trade trip, declared his support for such a move.“I am worried, like a lot of people, that this graphic, violent imagery is being transmitted to young minds without any context or understanding what it means, often before they’ve got any kind of maturity to deal with the implications of seeing it,” he said.“And once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it. So this is the problem of our times. Access to that kind of powerful technology in the hands of young people who lack the maturity to understand what it means. If it’s possible to implement that ban, I think we should.”The roundtable on Friday, called by Education Minister Prue Car and with Plibersek among those attending, follows a string of alleged sexual attacks by Sydney schoolboys.Three students from Scots College stand accused of raping a teenage girl in a Bondi Junction alleyway last month, while two students from St Gregory’s in south-west Sydney and a boy from another school allegedly assaulted a 17-year-old girl in a separate incident this month.Car said on Thursday: “I think every parent in Australia is worried about social media algorithms at the moment. It’s almost like everything comes back to that.“There’s a lot of toxic, violent stuff online that is being pushed to young boys, and we’ll be talking about this at our sexual violence roundtable [on Friday] because it can have tragic, tragic consequences.”The summit will include input from the online safety regulator, the eSafety Commissioner, as well as the school sector and victims.It comes in the context of calls by consent campaigner Chanel Contos for the federal government to introduce an opt-in feature for social media algorithms, allowing users to decide whether they want their feeds to be curated by an algorithm. Contos believes such a system must be opt-in to stop the “instant onboarding” into dangerous content.Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has flagged support for giving social media users more control over their algorithms, but stopped short of backing the specifics of Contos’ proposal.The government is more likely to pursue an opt-out feature among changes that will be put forward in Labor’s digital duty of care laws in October. Such a move would likely draw the ire of tech companies, as well as the US, where President Donald Trump’s administration and the US Congress have previously threatened Australia over social media regulation.Minns, who as premier introduced measures banning the use of phones in schools and in 2024 organised a social media summit with South Australian Premier Peter Malinauskas to push for a social media ban, did not express a preference for an opt-in or opt-out, but backed such a move.He also had a blunt reaction to likely pushback.“I hear from young people all the time, ‘yep, love to stop the algorithm and start again’. They can’t do it. So yeah, I’d love that. The social media companies will hate it, but stuff them,” he said.The spate of alleged sexual attacks by young boys prompted soul-searching in NSW parliament last week, as MPs and officials grappled with the problem.Minister for Women Jodie Harrison said she feared for “an entire generation of young people who are seeing a really twisted worldview of artificial intelligence and algorithms”. The NSW Women’s Safety Commissioner Dr Hannah Tonkin raised eyebrows during a budget estimates hearing when she said she avoided the term “toxic masculinity” because it could have an isolating effect on men.Those comments were interpreted by some as a government-wide edict, something Minns said he was not aware of. While he said the term was “overused” and could have “loaded meanings”, there had not been any ban on the phrase.“If that’s the best way of describing kind of online behaviour, hyper-insane behaviour [then use it, but] I think you’ve got to be careful about ascribing it to everyone. Some bloke weightlifting in a gym is not toxic masculinity. But this is not 1984, people can say what they want,” he said.More:Social mediaTanya PlibersekALPNSW State ParliamentChris MinnsConsent crisisFrom our partners