Stop big tech from making users behave in ways they don’t want to

In March 2025, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube liable for designing addictive products. The ruling made headlines. The internal documents it surfaced should have made bigger ones.

A confidential Meta slide deck from 2019 concluded that "teens can't switch off from Instagram even if they want to." Internal research had already mapped what employees described as an "addict's narrative": teens spending too much time on a compulsive activity they knew was negative but felt powerless to resist. One internal message read: "Oh my gosh y'all, [Instagram] is a drug. We're basically pushers."

Meta knew. The design choices that followed were deliberate.

"When platforms systematically manufacture the preferences of billions of users, consumer signals no longer point anywhere useful. That is a structural failure."

Our co-founder and CEO Marie Potel-Saville has published a piece in The Economist arguing that what she calls "predatory design" represents something more fundamental than a consumer protection problem. Free markets rest on a specific promise: consumers can see alternatives, compare them honestly, form preferences that reflect their actual interests, and switch freely. Cognitive exploitation undermines all of that - and when it operates at the scale of billions of users, it stops being an individual harm and becomes a structural one.

The Meta case is not an outlier. Amazon's internal name for its Prime cancellation flow was "the Iliad Flow," after Homer's epic of the long Trojan war. The process required users to navigate four pages, six clicks, and fifteen separate options before reaching the exit. By Amazon's own accounting, 35 million consumers had been enrolled without meaningful consent over seven years.

The regulatory response is moving, but it has not caught up. Marie's argument is that the burden of proof needs to shift: rather than requiring harmed users to demonstrate specific damage after the fact, companies should have to show, before deploying a product to billions of people, that it is not predatory by design. The same logic already applies to medicines and aircraft.

Read the full piece in The Economist

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