Doomscrolling Dangers Are a Worthy Legal Target

What if the next time you doom-scrolled through Instagram, X or TikTok, you reached an end point? It’s hard to imagine. The so-called infinite scroll has become such a fixture of social media that our dopamine receptors have come to expect it, even though it’s a time suck that undermines our mental health and serves no real purpose other than to keep us glued to an app for as long as possible.

A new law being drafted by the European Commission is designed to turn this and other similar engagement hacks off by default, targeting some of the psychological tricks that tech firms have long borrowed from the gambling world. The Digital Fairness Act (DFA) aims to tackle notification designs harnessing variable rewards, a tactic that dispenses a stimulus inconsistently, like the whirring dials of a slot machine, to keep you checking your phone. Internal research from Meta Platforms Inc. shows that batching notifications about likes and comments in a cluster gets stronger engagement than pinging them individually in real time. And the law will target autoplay, when a video on YouTube starts before you’ve decided to watch it.