Today, the European Commission (EC) has announced that it has preliminarily found Meta in breach of the EU’s Digital Services Act for what it calls “the addictive design of Instagram and Facebook”.
Specifically, its investigation focuses on features like infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and the services’ “highly personalized recommender systems”. The EC’s investigation indicates that Meta “did not adequately assess the risks of its addictive design on the physical and mental wellbeing of users, including minors and vulnerable adults”.
Highly personalized recommendations, autoplay, and infinite scroll “fuel the user’s urge to keep scrolling and shift the brain into ‘autopilot mode’, contributing to unhealthy habits and compulsive use”, the EC’s official press release states.
It also claims Meta “disregarded available information about the time minors spend on Instagram or Facebook at night and how the optimization of its different formats – such as reels and stories – could lead to excessive or compulsive use of the services”.
Instagram and Facebook’s time management tools, including those activated by default for teens, “can be easily dismissed and do not lead to a meaningful reduction and control of the usage of the service”, the EC believes. It also says Meta’s parental controls are only effective if parents and guardians “possess adequate technical expertise”, undermining the efficiency of such measures in addressing the risk posed by the services’ addictive design.
Meta’s Safety Center, which features tips and links to mental health resources, does not “sufficiently mitigate the risk of addictive design on Facebook and Instagram”, the EC has found. The Commission “considers that Meta needs to implement design changes to both Instagram and Facebook”, “disabling key addictive features such as ‘autoplay’ and ‘infinite scroll’ by default, implementing effective ‘screen time breaks’, and adapting its recommender system to make it less engagement-oriented”.
Meta can now exercise its right to defend itself. If, after that step, the Commission’s views are confirmed, the EC could issue a non-compliance decision, and that can trigger a fine “proportionate to the nature, gravity, recurrence, and duration of the infringement”, capped at 6% of Meta’s total worldwide annual turnover.