The European Commission said on 10 July that the design of Instagram and Facebook probably breaks European law, in a preliminary finding that Meta did not do enough to keep its platforms from being addictive. Regulators pointed to four features in particular: infinite scroll, autoplay, push notifications, and the highly personalised recommender systems that decide what each user sees.
The finding is the Commission’s clearest statement yet on what it wants changed. It said Meta should redesign both apps, including switching off autoplay and infinite scroll by default, adding screen-time breaks that actually interrupt use, and tuning its recommendations to be less focused on keeping people engaged. The word doing the heavy lifting is preliminary: this is an accusation the Commission now has to prove, not a penalty it has imposed.
What the Commission says the design does
The case is built on the Digital Services Act, the EU’s 2022 rulebook for large online platforms, which requires the biggest services to assess and reduce the “systemic risks” their design creates. The Commission’s view is that Meta did not adequately weigh the risk its addictive design poses to the physical and mental wellbeing of users, and that the gap is widest for minors and vulnerable adults.
In the Commission’s account, features such as personalised recommendations, autoplay and infinite scroll keep showing users new content without a natural stopping point, which “fuel the user’s urge to keep scrolling” and shift the brain into what regulators called “autopilot mode.” It also said Meta had information about how long minors spend on the apps late at night, and about how formats like reels and stories are optimised, and did not act on the risk of compulsive use that pattern suggested.
Why Meta’s existing safeguards didn’t satisfy Brussels
Meta already offers tools meant to address exactly these concerns, and much of the finding is an argument that those tools do not work well enough. The Commission said Instagram and Facebook’s time-management features, including some switched on by default for teenagers, “can be easily dismissed” and do not meaningfully reduce how much the apps get used.
Parental controls drew a similar objection: the Commission considers them effective only for parents who have the technical knowledge, time and patience to set them up, which limits how much protection they offer in practice. And Meta’s awareness-raising approach — tips and links to mental-health resources on a separate “safety centre” page — did not, in the regulator’s assessment, do enough to offset the pull of the design itself.
What happens next, and the 6% question
Nothing is final. Meta now has the right to defend itself: it can review the documents in the Commission’s file and respond in writing, and the European Board for Digital Services, which brings together national regulators, will be consulted before any decision. Only if the Commission’s view is ultimately confirmed can it issue a non-compliance decision, and only then does a fine come into play — one the DSA caps at 6% of a company’s total worldwide annual turnover, scaled to the gravity and duration of the breach.
Six percent of Meta’s global revenue would be a very large number, and it is the figure that will dominate headlines. It is also a ceiling, not a forecast, and it sits at the end of a process that has not run its course. Meta has rejected the finding; the company told CNBC it disagrees with the preliminary conclusions. The proceedings behind the finding were opened on 16 May 2024, which gives some sense of the pace.
A finding, not a verdict
It is worth being precise about what the Commission has and has not established. It has not ruled that Instagram and Facebook are addictive in any clinical sense, and the DSA does not turn on that question; the legal test is whether Meta properly assessed and mitigated the risks of its own design, and the Commission’s preliminary answer is that it did not. The Commission itself said the findings “do not prejudge the final outcome of the investigation.”
The evidence behind the finding is more than a hunch — the Commission says it drew on Meta’s internal data and risk-assessment reports, its responses to formal information requests, a review of the scientific literature, and interviews with experts including specialists in behavioural addiction. But “addictive design” remains a contested framing, and terms like “autopilot mode” describe an effect the Commission attributes to the features rather than a settled diagnosis. Meta will get to contest both the framing and the underlying analysis, and the specific remedies floated on 10 July — autoplay and infinite scroll off by default, enforced breaks, a cooler recommender — are what the Commission thinks is needed, not an order it has issued.
This is also not the only front. The same investigation covers the age-verification measures Meta uses for children under 13, on which the Commission issued separate preliminary findings on 29 April 2026, and a distinct inquiry into the “rabbit hole” effects of the two apps’ recommender systems is still open. What landed on 10 July is one preliminary finding in a wider case, pointed at how two of the world’s most-used apps are built, with the harder questions — whether the Commission can prove it, and what Meta will actually change — still ahead.
