What a Feed Opt-Out Law Means for Brand Reach.

Australia wants every social user to be asked one question: do you want the feed the platform picks for you, or only the accounts you chose to follow?

The draft Digital Duty of Care legislation, released by the Prime Minister’s office on 8 September under the title “My feed, my way”, would make platforms put that choice to every user. Two days later the head of Instagram used a press briefing in Australia to explain why he thinks a following-only feed is a worse product, and in doing so described exactly what happens to brands inside one.

That description is the useful part. The law is a draft and may change. The shape of a brand’s reach is measurable today.

This is the same government that brought in the under-16 rules, whose measured effect on audiences was smaller than the headlines suggested, as we found when Australia’s under-16 social rules ran long enough to read. The feed rule is separate legislation, aimed at everyone over 16.

What the draft would actually require

Three parts of the announcement matter for a social team, and all three are proposals rather than law.

Platforms would have to notify every user and offer a choice: stay with the personalised, recommended feed, or opt out and see only the friends and creators they choose to follow. The choice provisions apply to users over 16.

The same duty would require services to protect under-18s from addictive design features and from harmful content. It covers social platforms, online games, apps, AI chatbots and messaging services, not just the big feeds.

Non-compliance would carry a penalty of up to AUD 109.2 million. The draft has been released for consultation, and the government says it intends to introduce the legislation to Parliament this year. Nothing in it is in force.

What Instagram’s head said, and what he did not

At the 10 September briefing, reported by ABC News, Adam Mosseri did not comment on the Australian proposal directly. A Meta spokesman said he would not be doing so.

He did give his view of chronological feeds. “If you go to a chronological feed, it ends up getting overwhelmed with content from companies, brands, and publishers. Creators get drowned out, and then your friends get drowned out even more.”

He said engagement fell “by as much as 50 per cent” when users switched, while giving no figures, and that “the average user experience gets much worse”. The “passionate few” who wanted to opt out were happy with the choice, he said, but “those users were in the minority”.

Read that as a platform’s own statement about its product, not as a finding. But notice what it concedes: in a following-only feed, the accounts that post most win the feed, and those accounts are brands and publishers.

This feed already exists, and so does the law elsewhere

Instagram’s Following option shows posts from followed accounts in reverse chronological order, reachable from the logo on the home screen, as Meta’s own transparency page describes. ABC noted the catch: the feed reverts to the ranked version when the app is closed and reopened.

In the EU, this has been a legal requirement for three years. The Digital Services Act obliges very large platforms to offer a recommender option that is not based on profiling, and the European Commission’s own summary puts it plainly: on platforms with over 45 million monthly EU users, “you can now opt for non-personalised feeds”. Those obligations applied four months after designation in April 2023, and Meta’s announcement of 22 August 2023 gave EU users Stories and Reels from followed accounts only, in chronological order.

What nobody has published is how many people take the option. Meta has not released an EU uptake figure and the Commission’s pages do not carry one. The only indication is Mosseri’s own: the people who switch are a minority.

So the honest read of the EU is not “reach was unaffected”. It is that brands have operated under this option since 2023, and it changed little because the default held.

Why a following-only feed fills with brands

Mosseri’s description is the tell, and it cuts against Meta’s interest, which is why it is credible.

A person follows perhaps a few hundred accounts. Their friends post a few times a month. The brands and publishers they follow post daily, some several times a day. In a ranked feed the platform hides that imbalance by choosing. In a chronological feed there is nothing to hide it.

So the feed fills with the accounts that post most, and the person came for their friends. They have two options: leave the feed, which is what Mosseri’s engagement figure describes, or unfollow the accounts crowding it. Either way the brand that filled the feed loses.

That is the risk to a brand. Not the law, and not the default changing. A following-only feed rewards the follower’s choice and punishes the brand that abuses it.

Two kinds of reach, and only one survives the switch

Instagram’s insights split reach and views between followers and non-followers, and that split is the first thing to read.

A brand whose reach is mostly non-followers has been living on recommendation. Its followers are a small share of the people who see it, and in a following-only feed it keeps only that small share.

A brand whose followers chose it, and whose posts earn their place in the feed, keeps its audience whatever the default becomes.

Most brands do not know which of those they are, because the two numbers get reported as one reach figure. Pulling them apart is where our social media audit checklist starts: the split tells you how much of your audience the platform is lending you and how much you hold.

The follower is a real metric again

For three years the standard advice, ours included, has been that follower count stopped mattering because recommendation decided reach. That stays true inside the ranked feed.

It stops being true the moment a person switches. In a following-only feed, followers are the whole audience. Not the count: the followers who still want the posts.

That changes what growth means. A follower gained from one recommended post they enjoyed, who never wanted the daily output, is a liability in a chronological feed. A follower who came for a series and wants the next episode is the asset.

Why “post more” is exactly the wrong response

The instinct when reach is threatened is to publish more. In a ranked feed that mostly wastes effort. In a following-only feed it does active damage, because volume is the thing that gets a brand unfollowed.

Mosseri’s complaint about brands drowning out friends is a complaint about cadence. The brands that would be hurt most by a feed opt-out are the ones that treated posting frequency as a growth lever, and we have argued for a while that posting more is usually the wrong strategy even without a regulator involved.

Cadence inside the following feed has to become a decision rather than a habit. The question is not how often the platform will tolerate, but how often a follower would want to see you next to their friends.

What to do now, before any vote

None of this waits for Parliament. A UK or Gulf team can do all of it this month, and it holds whether or not the draft passes.

• Pull the follower and non-follower split for the last 90 days across posts, Reels and Stories, and write down the ratio. That number is your exposure.
• Open your own Following feed as a follower would, with your brand in it alongside real people, and read a week of it. If your account is the loudest thing there, you have your answer.
• Set a cadence you would defend to a follower, not to a dashboard, and hold it.
• Build at least one series with a reason to come back, because a return visit is what earns a place in a chosen feed.
• Treat the EU’s three years as the evidence: the option has existed at scale since 2023, and the default held.

What good looks like

A brand in good shape for this has a follower base it could name a reason for. It knows what share of its reach it owns. It posts at a cadence a person would choose, and it has one or two formats followers wait for.

That brand does not care which way Australia votes, or whether a UK regulator follows. Its reach was never on loan.

Next step

If your reach is mostly non-followers and you cannot say which posts your followers actually wanted, that is the constraint, and it is worth finding before a notification goes out to every user. If your social output feels busy but not effective, an NBK audit starts by pulling those two numbers apart.