"You’ve certainly experienced it: you grab your phone to do something specific, and end up getting lost in the maze of stimuli – sounds, colours, videos, notifications, urgent messages –so much so that you forget why you picked up the phone in the first place and stay far longer on it than planned. We keep inventing new words to describe aspects of the experience, whether it’s doomscrolling, internet rabbit holes, or brainrot. The good news is, this isn’t just something that happens to you. There’s a growing political consensus that this is a structural problem by design, that Big Tech has gone too far, and EU legislation is on the way to give you more control over addictive features in social media apps. The bad news is, Big Tech has begun a full scale lobbying battle against this legislation.
As the European Commission is preparing rules to rein in the addictive design of social media app – as part of the forthcoming Digital Fairness Act – the tech industry is drawing on its considerable lobbying firepower to oppose it. The legislation comes in response to growing concerns about the public health impacts of social media addiction, both for children, adolescents, and adults alike. But the Big Tech giants behind Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and other social media apps are pushing back. Keeping people on the apps for as long as possible is a central part of their business model and restrictions in addictive features would hurt their profits and power. In its lobbying, Big Tech aims to capitalize on the fact that EU decision-makers – with Commission President von der Leyen in the lead – are currently heavily prioritising industrial competitiveness via deregulation over other concerns. This means there are major new obstacles for legislation to pass."
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