New blog post on digital well-being and social media addictive design
Nina Baranowska and Gianclaudio Malgieri have published a new blog post on Verfassungsblog: 'Towards a Legal Concept of Digital Well-being: Insights from the EU Commission’s Preliminary Findings on TikTok’s Addictive Design'.
Nina Baranowska, postdoc researcher at eLaw, and Gianclaudio Malgieri, Associate Professor and Board Member at eLaw, both work at the NWA project RESOCIAL, analysing interdisciplinary studies of human vulnerability on social media.
In the post, the authors examine the European Commission’s preliminary findings on TikTok’s addictive design and argue that the legal debate on social media should move beyond content moderation alone and pay closer attention to platform design. They focus in particular on features such as infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and personalised recommender systems, which may contribute to compulsive or prolonged use and create risks for users’ mental and physical well-being.
The blog post uses these developments to reflect on how EU law, and especially the Digital Services Act, might begin to develop a clearer legal concept of digital well-being. It proposes a way of thinking about harms linked to attention-capturing design through concepts such as vulnerability, autonomy, health, and social participation.
The full blog post is available on Verfassungsblog.