Last week, the European Commission preliminarily found Meta in breach of the Digital Services Act over the addictive design of Instagram and Facebook – infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and hyper-personalised recommender systems engineered to keep users, including children, hooked. The findings landed alongside the final report of the Commission’s special panel on protecting children online, which calls for decisive European action on age-appropriate digital services.
We welcome both and so, it turns out, do Europeans.
The public is not divided on this
The Commission’s investigation confirms what parents, educators, and researchers have been saying for years (and the numbers back it up). According to the latest Flash Eurobarometer (July 2026), Europeans are overwhelmingly concerned about the risks children face on social media: cyberbullying (71%), online grooming and sexual exploitation (70%), exposure to harmful content (69%), and addictive design itself (60%).
Nor do Europeans believe this is a problem families can solve alone.
Nearly two in three (63%) want EU-level rules restricting children’s access to social media by age, whether prohibiting access below a certain age (36%) or delaying access to unsafe platforms (27%). When asked how to tackle harmful and misleading content more broadly, Europeans favour tougher regulatory measures like stronger sanctions (44%) and stronger platform rules (40%) – well ahead of education and fact-checking (29%).
The features under investigation are not accidental. Time-management tools dismissible with a tap, parental controls that only work if you have an engineering degree and a free weekend – none of this is a bug. The Commission is right to demand design changes: autoplay and infinite scroll off by default, meaningful screen-time breaks, recommender systems that are less relentlessly engagement-driven.
The limits of the regulation
Enforcement matters, and a fine of up to 6% of global turnover is relevant. Regulation alone will not solve this problem because addictive design is not a feature of these platforms: it is the business model.
Meta’s revenue depends on attention. Every minute a teenager spends scrolling is inventory. And the stakes go beyond wellbeing: two thirds of Europeans (66%) now use social media every day to get information on current affairs and politics, while nearly six in ten come across unreliable (58%) or seemingly false (57%) content at least several times a week. A company can disable autoplay and soften its recommender system while its fundamental incentive – maximise time on platform, harvest engagement, sell it to advertisers – remains fully intact.
Regulate one dark pattern, and the model will quietly produce the next.
Break the lock-in, not just the features
If the business model is the problem, the answer is to make it contestable. The most powerful tool for that is one the EU already believes in: data portability.
Today, families are trapped. A parent who decides whether their kids leave a given platform, and lose the social connections, photos, messages, communities. Or stay and deal with a platform that always wins at the cost of their kids’ safety. That switching cost is precisely what allows platforms to keep engagement-maximising design in place. Users can’t credibly walk away, as alternatives do not provide the same social environment.
Real, usable data portability changes that equation. If children and their parents or caregivers could take their data, connections, and content to a new platform – one designed around wellbeing rather than watch time – safer alternatives could actually compete. Safety would become a market feature, not a compliance cost or a workaround. The building blocks exist: the DSA, the Digital Markets Act’s interoperability provisions, the GDPR’s portability right. What’s missing is the ambition to support those who have built or are building safe platforms that families can actually use.
Conclusion
We support the Commission’s preliminary findings, and Europeans clearly support decisive EU action. Forcing a less addictive design is necessary. But as long as leaving a platform means losing everything, the attention economy will keep finding ways to capture our attention and our children’s attention.
Give users a real exit, and safer platforms a real chance: let’s break the model, not just limiting the features.