EU lawmaker points to mental health risks for online services’ addictive design

Abida Shaheen

A European Parliament draft report about online services’ addictive design paints a damning picture of the mental health consequences of excessive screen time and calls for new EU rules to address the problem.

Addictive design, which refers to capturing users’ attention so they spend as much time on platforms as possible, has been on the radar of the EU for a while. Last year, as EURACTIV reported, the European Parliament’s Committee on Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO) was preparing to deliver a resolution on ‘Addictive design of online services’.

The initiative’s lead was assigned to the Green MEP Kim van Sparrentak, who published her draft report last week providing a detailed account of the mental health risks of excessive screen time.

As it is an own-initiative report, the file has no legislative value. Still, it is meant to give a political signal, precisely at a time when the European Commission is assessing whether its consumer protection rules are still fit for purpose.

According to the draft report, on average, one in four children and young people, especially 16–24-year-olds, spend over seven hours a day on the internet. More than two to three hours in front of a screen already counts as excessive screen time.

This can be due to online games, social media, streaming services for films, series or music, online marketplaces or webshops, and dating apps, being designed so that users spend their maximum amount of time or money on the platform instead of serving them “in a more neutral manner.”

The draft report says that YouTube, Netflix, and Spotify offer functions like the infinite scroll or the default auto-play, defining them as “psychological tricks to keep consumers online.” Other addictive design features include a ‘pull-to-refresh’ page reload or personalised recommendations.

Such features play into “psychological needs, vulnerabilities and desires of consumers such as social belonging, social anxiety, or fear of missing out.” An example of the latter is temporarily available information, such as ‘stories’ or the ‘is typing…’ function.

Another example is receiving likes, which gives the brain a dopamine surge. However, features can come with social pressure to respond to people, such as read-receipts. Moreover, messages and other notifications are luring back consumers onto the platforms.

For the Dutch lawmaker, internet-use-related addiction has similar side effects to substance-related addictions that, contrarily to the online ones, are more strictly regulated.

The MEP stressed that addicted users are twice as likely to have mental health issues, such as depression, low self-esteem, body-image disorders, eating disorders, anxiety, high levels of perceived stress, neglect of family and friends, loss of self-control, or lack of sleep.

There is also the risk of obsessive-compulsive symptoms, such as compulsive buying among young adults, or problems with competing daily obligations, resulting in declining grades, poor school and academic performance or poor job performance.

Excessive screen time and too much social media can cause attention deficits, shorter attention spans, impulsivity, neurodevelopmental disorders, limited cognitive ability, and difficulties in learning and memory, the report reads.

Also mentioned is that the abuse of digital technologies can result in lower levels of grey matter in certain areas of the brain, which also happens when someone is addicted, for example, to alcohol or heroin.

Moreover, there is an increasing risk of stress and burnout, information overload, and sensorial stimuli.

The document reports that boys generally spend more time on gaming and electronic devices. Yet girls are more likely to have poor mental health due to too much screen time than boys.

Female internet users are also twice as likely to have clinically relevant levels of depressive symptoms than male ones. Adolescents who spend little time on electronic communication are generally the happiest.

The draft report says that introducing time limits on online services is not enough to solve the addiction problems, mainly because “platforms offering time limits shift the burden to the individual instead of addressing the core issue of intentional addictive design of online services for profit.”

It also did not lead to a decrease in usage of online services and adolescents, who do not easily accept parental regulations either and bypassing technical limits is easy for them. Van Sparrentak also points to the limits of existing or upcoming EU rules.

The Digital Services Act does not introduce provisions about addictive design and is “limited in scope as it only applies to online platforms, not to all online services.” The AI Act seeks to ban AI systems from deploying subliminal features, a provision limited to systems that “are purposefully manipulative or deploy deceptive techniques.”

Therefore, the report calls on the Commission to “urgently close existing regulatory gaps with regard to consumer vulnerabilities,” to present legislation against addictive design and to review the Unfair Commercial Practices Directive, Consumer Rights Directive and Unfair Contract Terms Directive.

The EU executive has indeed been conducting a ‘fitness check‘ of the current EU consumer law, with the view of proposing a Digital Fairness Act in the next mandate.