Portugal is leading the movement against ‘addictive design’ on digital platforms.

D3 is the Portuguese association for the defence of digital rights, and a member of EDRI – European Digital Rights, the European network of NGOs dedicated to digital rights and freedoms, which brings together more than 50 other organisations and dozens of observers, and which is celebrating its 23rd anniversary this year.

Leading the European movement against addictive design on social media, D3 has brought four cases before the Portuguese civil courts against the platforms Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, acting as a collective representative of the rights of the Portuguese people.

The class actions were brought in April and May this year by the law firm Andersen Tax & Legal Iberia, by a team of lawyers led by Dr Miguel Miranda and Dr Efigénia Marabuto Tavares, with the support of academic experts Professor Dr Fabrizio Esposito and Dr Cecília Isola, from the NOVA School of Law.

These are the first class actions of this kind to be brought in the European Union. Further initiatives are being prepared in other Member States. D3 is open to joining some of these initiatives with a view to driving forward a pan-European strategy.

Why take these actions?

Online platforms have unprecedented access to people’s behaviour, social interactions and even their private lives, concentrating massive amounts of information in the hands of a small number of companies. This hegemonic informational power is exploited through constant monitoring to shape our private behaviour, without any limits.

Companies employ addictive design tactics, known as ‘dark patterns’, such as infinite scrolling, automatic content playback, persistent notifications, personalised algorithmic recommendation systems and gamification mechanisms to foster addictive behaviours similar to those found in gambling.

These practices are designed with the aim of maximising, at any cost, the time spent on and interaction with these networks, drawing on knowledge of human psychological and neuro-cerebral processes, combined with an understanding of users’ preferences, intimacy, vulnerabilities, aspirations and emotional states, thanks to the computational power to micro-manage overwhelming volumes of information.

In this way, the platforms progressively shape users’ behaviour, making it difficult to voluntarily stop using them, reducing the scope for independent decision-making and fostering patterns of compulsive use.

Such practices are recognised in the scientific literature – in the fields of medicine, psychology, sociology and technology – as effective in forming compulsive habits and behaviours. Their impact has also been recognised by the European Parliament and has been the subject of formal investigations by the European Commission, as well as legal proceedings in the US and the Netherlands.

Against an unrestrained, exploitative business model

This business model, based on the ‘attention economy’, has reached exploitative levels that are harmful to everyone: children, young people, adults and the elderly. The curtailment of individual freedom cannot form the basis of business models that resort to perverse mechanisms to capture attention.

The aim of these actions is to hold these platforms to account and ensure they provide a safe experience for their users.

Excluding minors is not the right answer

The response to this situation, which is widely regarded as a social problem, cannot involve penalising people who use and rely on these platforms, as is implicit in the proposal to restrict access to those under 16, currently under discussion in Parliament.

They have become essential means of communication and interaction, and it is therefore imperative to make them safe. Ricardo Lafuente, president of D3, argues that “Platforms do not have to be hyper-addictive. A healthy, productive and educational social media ecosystem is possible, but only if the rules are firm, properly enforced and targeted at those who really insist on ignoring them”.

We all – young people and adults alike – deserve a better internet, and this initiative is an important step in our fight to achieve that.