EU Tells Meta: Kill Infinite Scroll and Autoplay or Face Billion-Dollar Fines
European regulators say Facebook and Instagram were designed to keep you stuck, and they want it stopped.
Key points
- The European Commission, the EU's executive body, made a preliminary finding in 2025 that Meta's Facebook and Instagram use design features that cause addictive behaviour.
- Features named include autoplay (videos that start playing without you pressing anything), infinite scroll (a feed that never reaches a bottom), and highly personalised content recommendations.
- Regulators say Meta failed to properly assess the harm these features cause to mental and physical health, including to children and vulnerable adults.
- Meta could face fines worth a significant share of its global annual revenue if the EU's final ruling goes against it.
Picture a slot machine. You did not choose to pull the lever again. The machine just kept going. That is roughly what European regulators are accusing Meta of building into Facebook and Instagram.
The European Commission said its investigation found that Meta "did not adequately assess the risks of its addictive design on the physical and mental wellbeing of users, including minors and vulnerable adults." In plain terms: Meta built features it knew kept people glued to their screens, and regulators say the company never seriously asked whether that was doing harm.
The three features in the crosshairs are familiar to anyone who has ever lost an hour to their phone. Autoplay starts the next video the moment the current one ends, so you never have to make a choice to keep watching. Infinite scroll means your feed has no natural stopping point, no bottom of the page where you might put the phone down. Personalised recommendations use your past behaviour to serve you exactly the content most likely to hold your attention, which sounds helpful until it isn't.
"These features fuel the user's urge to keep scrolling and shift the brain into 'autopilot mode,' contributing to unhealthy habits and compulsive use," the Commission said.
This matters most for younger users. Children and teenagers are still developing the self-regulation skills adults rely on, and regulators are specifically worried the platforms exploit that gap.
The finding is preliminary, meaning Meta has a chance to respond before any final decision is made. But the Digital Services Act, the EU law that governs this area, allows fines of up to six percent of a company's total global turnover. For Meta, which reported revenues of roughly 135 billion US dollars in 2024, six percent is not a rounding error.
What does this mean for ordinary users?
If the EU follows through, Europeans could soon see Facebook and Instagram without autoplay videos and without the endless feed. Some platforms already offer optional timers or feed limits. This ruling, first reported by Ars Technica, could make such changes mandatory rather than buried in a settings menu.
For parents, the practical takeaway is immediate: most phones and apps already offer screen-time limits and autoplay controls in their settings. You do not need to wait for regulators to act. Going into your child's app settings today and turning off autoplay is a five-minute job that removes one of the specific mechanisms regulators flagged.
