BRUSSELS – The European Commission said on Thursday that Instagram and Facebook are designed to be addictive, and that this design violates the Digital Services Act. The preliminary finding targets three specific features: infinite scrolling, video autoplay, and personalized algorithmic recommendations. All three, according to the Commission, shift users into states of compulsive engagement that Meta has not adequately assessed for risks to mental and physical health.
The finding is preliminary, meaning Meta has the opportunity to respond before a final decision arrives in a few months. If the Commission’s conclusion is confirmed, Meta faces a fine of up to 6 percent of its annual global turnover, a number that on Meta’s recent revenue figures would represent billions of dollars. The company disagrees with what the Commission found.
“We disagree with these preliminary findings, which don’t accurately take into account the significant steps we’ve taken to protect teens,” said Ben Walters, a Meta spokesperson. The statement’s focus on teenagers is notable: Meta’s defense rests largely on the parental controls and age-verification measures it has added in recent years, while the Commission’s case targets the adult product as well, not only the version marketed to younger users.
What the Commission is specifically asking Meta to do is disable these features by default. Infinite scrolling, the design choice that removes any natural stopping point from a social media feed, would need to be off unless a user actively turned it on. Video autoplay, which launches the next video without a decision being required, would face the same requirement. Algorithmic personalization, the system that continuously adjusts what content appears based on past behavior, would need to be reduced.
The Commission’s language goes beyond describing commercial harm. Their preliminary finding states that these features cause users’ “brains to shift into autopilot mode,” a claim that borrows from behavioral science research rather than narrowly technical analysis. That framing matters because it positions the DSA enforcement as a health intervention, not just a competition or transparency measure. It is a notable escalation in how the Commission has chosen to articulate what it believes these platforms are doing to the people using them.
The Digital Services Act, which entered into force across the European Union in 2024, requires large platforms to assess and mitigate systemic risks. In the Commission’s reading, Meta has run Instagram and Facebook in ways that create systemic risks, specifically the risk that users cannot easily stop using them because the product is designed to prevent natural stopping points. Meta has argued it has taken steps to address concerns about user wellbeing. The Commission’s preliminary view is that those steps have not been sufficient.
This is not the first time Meta has faced regulatory action in Europe over its platform design. The Commission has previously investigated Meta under the Digital Markets Act, a separate piece of EU legislation focused on competition, and Meta has been subject to data protection rulings under GDPR. The DSA case is the first to reach this kind of explicit finding about design features as the source of the breach, rather than data practices or anti-competitive behavior. Meta also recently removed its Muse AI tool from Instagram after backlash over its use of users’ likenesses without consent, a separate controversy that arrived while the Commission’s preliminary finding was being developed.
The practical question of what disabling infinite scrolling by default actually looks like on a platform with roughly three billion active users is one neither the Commission’s finding nor Meta’s response has fully addressed. Versions of Instagram with usage limits already exist within the app’s own settings, available to anyone who navigates to them. The distinction the Commission is drawing is between optional controls and defaults, and the Commission’s position is that making these features opt-in rather than opt-out is a fundamental change, not a cosmetic one.
Meta’s response period, which extends for several months before any final determination, runs in parallel with broader EU digital regulation enforcement. Streaming platforms have also been navigating questions about engagement design and default settings as regulators in multiple jurisdictions push back on product mechanics that were once treated as purely commercial decisions beyond regulatory reach.
Whether Meta makes any product changes before the final decision, or waits to contest the finding and accepts the financial risk if it loses, will reveal something about how it calculates the European market against the cost of compliance. The DSA’s enforcement architecture gives the Commission leverage that earlier EU legislation did not: the ability to fine not on per-violation grounds but as a percentage of global revenue, meaning the financial exposure is tied to Meta’s overall scale rather than the scale of any individual infraction in Europe.
The Commission’s Thursday finding is the clearest statement yet that it treats algorithmic product design as a legal liability under European law, not merely a matter for industry self-regulation. Whether that position, once confirmed through final proceedings, reshapes how Meta and other platforms approach design decisions for European users, or whether it produces a compliance response narrowly calibrated to the letter of the ruling, is a question the next few months of proceedings will begin to answer.
