A legislative proposal to finally end addictive tech design and fix social media by making tech giants pay the price of compulsive use.
Today’s biggest social media platforms have a direct financial incentive to build products that hook consumers. The more time a user spends on the platform, the more money these companies can make from ads and data collection.
The warped incentive to maximize time-spent drives virtually all of the problems presented by social media. It's bad for consumers—and society.
Many proposals have emerged in recent years to address some of these harms, from prohibiting specific features for minors to banning phones in schools. These are important steps in the right direction, but more is needed. We need to directly address the root of the problem.
For meaningful, lasting change, we must make big tech companies feel the costs their products are imposing on consumers and society.
The Accountability for Addictive Design Act would flip the incentives for tech companies. Instead of designing their products to increase engagement at all costs, the bill would force companies to innovate and take all reasonable steps to make their products less addictive.
An addictive design tort doesn't inflexibly prohibit companies from using any design features. It simply requires that they take all reasonable steps to prevent compulsive use.
This ensures that companies have full freedom to design products that are good for consumers, while simultaneously preventing them from designing their products to be more addictive, and even encouraging them to proactively find ways to make their products less addictive.
The bill only requires companies to take all reasonable steps to prevent compulsive use. This well-established framework looks to whether a platform could have been designed to be less likely to cause compulsive use, but expects companies to have opted for this safer design only when doing so would not sacrifice more utility than it would provide.
This ensures that companies will not need to make their products unusable or worse for consumers in order to comply with the duty. If a jury (a panel of, in effect, ordinary consumers) thinks the more addictive design benefits consumers more than it hurts them, the company will not be liable. In this way, the bill will force companies to find ways to make their products less addictive, but without ruining the platforms entirely.
When specific design features are banned, companies are likely to come up with new, similarly harmful features that fall just outside the scope of the existing prohibition. This creates a major future-proofing issue.
A general duty to take reasonable steps to prevent compulsive use avoids this. Instead of providing specific rules companies can skirt around, it imposes a general standard of conduct (a duty of reasonable care) to which companies must conform, and then uses that standard to determine, after an injury has occurred, whether the company should have done more to prevent it. This forces companies to exercise genuine care—and, when in doubt, err on the side of caution—rather than finding ways to comply with the letter of the law while undermining its spirit.
While children and teens are unusually vulnerable, addictive social media design hurts everyone. Yet all the regulatory efforts so far have focused on kids. This is because they restrict rights in a way that would be deemed paternalistic if applied to adults.
But rather than restricting freedom, the Accountability for Addictive Design Act works by giving consumers the right to be compensated when they have suffered a specific harm. This offers a politically viable way to protect all consumers, not just kids. This means companies would not need to engage in any form of age assurance to comply with the law.
Allowing consumers to sue and recover for addictive design puts power in the hands of the people. Ordinary people bring the claims, and ordinary people (jurors) evaluate them to decide if the companies should have done more to prevent the harm.
Relying on private enforcement, rather than government, prevents abuse or selective enforcement (always a concern given the role these platforms play in the dissemination of news and information). It also insulates enforcement from shifting political priorities and regulatory capture.
The tech industry aggressively challenges even the most modest social media regulations in court. But, as explained more below, an addictive design tort’s focus on social media companies as product designers rather than content distributors or publishers makes it especially well placed to survive First Amendment and Section 230 challenges. The tort's reliance on well-trodden principles like “reasonableness” also helps ward off a vagueness challenge, while allowing the law to stay broad enough to be effective.