EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA

Full title: "Commission preliminarily finds the addictive design of Instagram and Facebook in breach of the Digital Services Act"

Edit: for some reason, the URL has been changed. The page I tried to post is here: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_...

this is the wrong approach. they should enforce a choice between addictive and "ethical" algorithms (or even better allow third party feeds), make them transparent with what kind of data they use to personalize and strictly ban any kind of political bias.

things like bluesky fyp should always stay legal and not in a gray area. even if someone comes up with a design thats more addictive than hard drugs people should have the option (but never be forced) to use it. if this is about kids then use california style on device age signals set by parents.

i just dont think addiction by itself is something we should be fighting. yes i believe in legalizing all drugs how could you tell.

I think the strongest point is about the mismatch between the product and the mitigation. You can't optimize every surface for "one more minute" and then point to a dismissible time-limit popup as evidence that the user is in control

Only tangentailly related, but, there is an option in Instagram to reset your algorithm. I highly recommend this if you find yourself doom-scrolling.

Not sure if it's also in FB on account of me not having an account there.

I kind of wish they had developers that know how to get a video upload working from the website.

Alas, it all must have gotten scrapped for a llama workflow.

Website is worse than 15 years ago (code AND contents).

Forcing social media apps to have a less addictive design is a much better way to protect young people's brains than a social media age limit is (and frankly adults need help here too).

Just ban the discovery feed. Search only.

And what about the addictive design of advertisements that keeps us hooked on consuming more and more stuff?

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/382310867_Methods_o...

The addictive design is in service of ads. Instead of regulating software, tax ad revenue to disincentivize building a business model around user profiling and tracking.

And yet the Mata price jumped yesterday. For some investors this is apparently a feature.

This is the same EU commission pushing chat control and VPN bans and passports to access the internet. Which people on HN hate.

Yet, when they couch authoritarian action under the premise of a popular moral panic, suddenly the reaction here is “tie us up and tell us what we’re allowed to see daddy.”

I really don’t get it. Do you not see how cheering on this social media moral panic and inflating the idea of a big tech “boogieman” leads to emboldening them to do the much worse authoritarian surveillance state thing? I guess this is the inherent contradiction of left-leaning internet spaces.

We want privacy and freedom personally but as self-styled members of the urban elite we unironically believe everyone else is dumber than us. So we don’t want other people to have freedom over what they do and read.

Would love to see the overlap between the average anti-Big Tech HN commenter cheering on this regulatory advance, and the average HN commenter who thinks hard drugs should be legalized and that the War on Drugs is bad. Because these are contradictory positions! Either you think people should be free to do things that are addictive or you don't

This is welcome news but I have several friends, family members, or acquaintances that are addicted to social media and have to take psychiatric medication for it. The trouble is, and I'm not sure if the algorithm incentivizes it, but they don't take their pills. They don't even take multivitamins because of whatever idiotic misinformation they're being fed. It becomes a positive feedback loop and anything I and other people try to break it always fails and it feels like social media wants to keep it that way. This is much worse than they're telling us about.

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These apps should be banned or be forced to only show feeds from accounts you follow in chronological order, nothing more. Perhaps with some basic search if you want to discover something new, but cumbersome enough so that you don't spend hours on it.

I know someone he keeps scrolling the minute they wake up. They are behind on chores, life stuff, but keep scrolling.

That wouldn't be too bad in itself if not for sheer amount of misinformation that is being served. Especially health related. Thanks to AI enhanced videos showing parasites everywhere, person now has developed eating disorder and thinks their poor health is due to parasites and not the fact they spend whole day on Instagram. Now they started ordering "supplements" and "courses" those people peddle. I tried to report these accounts, but Meta insist they are no breaching any T&C.

Nothing was ever said about the addictive design of mainstream TV - because then the rulers controlled the message being streamed into the brains of the population.

It is precisely on Facebook and Instagram where you find the only popular movements against the current order in Europe, and the citizen journalists who expose and scrutinize the powers. It's a giant political threat towards those in power.

So, how do we keep the good parts and get rid of the bad parts of the free flow of information on social media, where all citizens are invited to broadcast?

The US should start fining all EU created software.

While it is genuinely a huge concern, the legal measure are not going to address it. One has to consider the overall picture, not just a corner of it.

The ship has sailed. There will be addictive designs, products, services etc. The very theme of a business is centered around keeping the customers addicted. It's just a matter of time, every business on this planet would, with the help of AI, make their products and services extremely addictive.