THE EU COMMISSION TAKES ON META’s ADDICTIVE ALGORITHMS
The European Commission thinks that Instagram and Facebook are designed to be addictive and break digital services law (the EU DSA). Their investigation shows that Meta hasn’t properly assessed the risks of how addictive its product is on the physical and mental well-being of users, including minors and vulnerable adults. The Commission suggests that Meta should make some changes to the design of Instagram and Facebook. Key addictive features like autoplay and infinite scrolling should be turned off by default, effective breaks should be added, and the recommendation system should be adjusted to make it less focused on engagement. The Commission thinks some functionalities s feed the urge to keep scrolling. It contributes to compulsive use. Moreover, META ignores the information available about how much time minors spend on Instagram or Facebook at night and how some algorithms can lead to excessive or compulsive use of the services. At present, this is an inquiry, and META can provide arguments to deny the charges.
USA: PRESS EDITORS AND AUTHORS SUE AI PLATFORMS
(We hereby reproduce an extract of an article by Jonathan Koskas, a Digital Strategy and Technology Consultant, published by TELOS on July 10)
A major legal battle is playing out today in the United States between big news publishers and several players in artificial intelligence. The New York Times kicked things off in December 2023 by filing a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of using millions of its articles to train their models without permission or compensation, seeking damages that could run into the billions of dollars. In 2024 and 2025, other lawsuits were filed against companies like Perplexity and Meta, notably by publishing groups and news agencies who argue that their content has been used on a large scale without payment. Publishers, authors, media outlets, and agencies are looking to establish that generative AI wasn’t just built on technical innovation, but also on the massive appropriation of content created by others.
Beyond the question of copyright alone, these cases invite us to think more broadly about how AI giants are built. In fact, their meteoric rise is less about innovation itself and more about a harsher logic: turning what already existed for them into a resource, and then imposing their own products as a reality everyone is expected to follow. Upstream, this involves tapping into intellectual, creative, and behavioral commons that their models need to develop, especially during critical training phases; downstream, it’s about launching these products without any kind of collective deliberation.
