The algorithms have been kind to Pauline Hanson, which must be why she was so quick to jump to their defence when the Albanese government moved to rein them in this week.

“Labor is copying the Chinese Communist Party’s censorship playbook,” she posted on Facebook, of all places – you know, the platform that is alleged to have compliantly adopted the Chinese Communist party’s censorship playbook, in order to operate in China.

Last week, Hanson called the reforms “Orwellian machinery”. She joins a chorus of those crying censorship from Sarah Henderson to Matt Canavan. The “deeply sceptical” Angus Taylor will surely soon follow.

There is machinery at play, for sure, and it is Orwellian: keeping us under constant surveillance; bombarding us with misinformation, and suppressing any corrective dissent. But that machinery is the algorithms those critics are so desperate to protect, not the laws that seek to reduce the harm they cause.

Calling something “Orwellian censorship” is just one of the many sure-fire ways to get noticed by social media algorithms. They love a reductive argument stripped of reality, and lashed with emotive exaggeration.

They love hysteria, outrage and conflict. There are rewards aplenty for those who peddle in them, even if it breaks society in the process. In the online attention economy, extremism sells. So every grievance grifter and grandstanding grafter rushes out to game the algorithm and send digital effluent cascading down our feeds in the form of “angertainment”.

It’s what leads teenage boys to the manosphere, where the number of young men who think “a woman’s place is in the home” has grown by 400% in the last five years in some countries. Or teenage girls to an eating disorder, with one poll of 730 Australian frontline eating disorder workers finding every single respondent blamed social media.

These are the ideals critics of the government’s push stand in defence of: the right of the platforms to promote harm over health, rage over reason, fake over fact. They stand for the rights of Silicon Valley to censor Australia, by giving big tech bros control over what we are allowed to see and read.

What does the federal government’s proposed legislation do? It allows Australians to choose whether they want their feeds to be censored or not.

An “opt out” pop up will ask users who they want in charge of their feed, the platform and its personalised recommendations (read: mining your attention with harmful clickbait) or the user who can instead see posts from accounts they choose to follow (read: social media circa 2014). The only censorship to be suffered will be by big tech, who all of a sudden lose control of your information diet.

The second change the legislation will bring is akin to making sure that diet doesn’t kill you, in the same way the government “censors” food companies by telling them they aren’t allowed to sell yoghurt pouches laced with arsenic.

This is the “duty of care” the laws will impose on digital platforms to make products that are safe for human consumption – in the same way any other industry must already do.

This is not radical. Manufacturers have no “free speech” to make products that injure consumers. “Big Brother” tells theatres where to put fire exits. Theme park operators are “censored” from building rollercoasters that crash and burn.

Social media platforms should likewise have a legal duty of care to build digital rollercoasters that don’t crash, and provide fire escapes from the toxic bin fire of their content.

In fact, a duty of care is the best way to rein in the harms social media algorithms cause precisely because it is not censorship. Post-pandemic efforts that proscribed content to be removed (like anti-vaccination conspiracies) failed because it made the conversation about free speech. It wedged support for a healthy town square based on what you say in it.

Shifting to put the responsibility on to the platforms to make their design safe, shifts the government’s role to one of enforcer not censor. Leave the outrage merchants free to shout into the ether but remove the rewards that amplify them when they do so.

Duties of care impose a legal responsibility to proactively avoid foreseeable harm. The harms of these platform design choices are foreseeable. We see them every day. Hanson and other’s bad faith grifting is merely one of them we saw in recent days, tomorrow it will be something else – so long as we continue to allow the algorithms to censor our feeds.

• Ed Coper is a political commentator and the author of Angertainment: How Social Media Outrage Ruined Everything. He is the chief executive of communications agency Populares