If you didn’t hear, in August, Meta Platforms Inc.’s agreed to pay up to $18 billion to settle with 52 attorneys general across all US states and territories over alleged harms to children. This case first became visible in 2021 when whistleblower and former Facebook employee Frances Haugen testified before the U.S. House and Senate, and also the United Kingdom Parliament, was able to detail (with thousands of pages of copied confidential documents) exactly how Facebook tried (and succeeded) to addict the young and how it knew exactly what harms it was causing by doing so, yet did not change its product. 5 years later, we have the result. And it’s probably just a starting point for the conversation at large.
What part could designers possibly play in addiction?
It’s a complicated space and is rarely any one feature in isolation; but the trial goes that it is an accumulation of small creative decisions that make continued engagement easier than disengagement. In Meta’s case, the allegations centred on platforms deliberately designed to keep young users engaged, while the resulting settlement targets many of the mechanisms that can contribute to that experience: continuous algorithmic recommendations, autoplay, visible like counts, frequent notifications and the absence of meaningful limits or stopping cues. Meta has now agreed to measures including time limits, regular usage prompts, overnight restrictions, reduced notifications and greater control over personalised feeds and autoplay. The concern is not simply that these features make a platform enjoyable or easy to use, but that together they can create an environment in which the next interaction arrives before the user has consciously chosen it. Addictive design, in that sense, is often less about forcing someone to stay than ‘designing away’ the moments in which they might otherwise decide to leave.
The conversation to have
Meta’s settlement has really hurried a conversation we’ve been wishy-washy about for some time, that is, defining what we mean by ethical design, and whether our responsibility ends when the work performs well.
Creative ethics is a phrase highly synonymous with current AI conversation. We debate disclosure, copyright, attribution, training data, authenticity, whether a photographer was paid, whether an illustrator’s style was scraped, whether an AI-generated image should be labelled, and whether creativity is being augmented, appropriated or replaced. These are all important conversations in their own right, and I want absolutely no part in minimising them. Our industry should absolutely be having them. But while we have become increasingly concerned with the ethics of how something is made, we have spent considerably less time discussing the ethics of what we make people do and feel with our work.
It feels particularly difficult to ignore this topic in light of Meta’s US$18 billion settlement with a bipartisan group of attorneys general across the United States. Partly because the case centred on allegations that deaths of teens and tweens were attributed to the deliberate design that encouraged addictive use. Meta has denied wrongdoing, and the agreement remains subject to judicial approval, but the scale of the settlement has inevitably made headlines. It feels like we’re closer to accountability than ever before. So why do I feel nervous?
For the strategists and digital creatives amongst us, the more interesting story sits inside what Meta has agreed to change. They have ‘committed’ to measures including default daily time limits for teenagers, overnight restrictions, ‘School Hours’ with silenced notifications, stronger parental oversight, more reminders around time spent online, changes to default recommendations around autoplay, and lastly, social validation features (such as ‘likes’ counts). None of these interventions is particularly revolutionary in isolation, but we have come a long way. It was only 10 years ago you were afraid to open a new website for the fear that a digital mp3 player would be embedded in the top right-hand corner and would start blaring music without consent. If you were lucky, it was of the elevator variety. If you were unlucky it was Ke$ha, mid chorus.
Together, though, they acknowledge something our industry has been slow to confront: the way an experience is designed can influence whether somebody is able to regulate their relationship with it. That matters because creative responsibility can no longer stop at whether something is beautiful, accessible, intuitive or effective. We also have to ask whether the success of the thing we have made is capable of producing harm.
That’s where modern accessibility guidelines become our North Star
“Remove friction” is one of the most familiar lines in contemporary creative work, especially when we’re working on government/corporate or multilingual work. We are routinely asked to reduce clicks, simplify journeys, make calls to action more obvious, remove unnecessary decisions, improve retention, make purchasing seamless and ensure an experience is intuitive enough that the user barely has to think about what comes next. Most of the time, these are entirely reasonable goals, but bigger than that – in the context of accessibility, they are essential.
Accessibility has rightly pushed the industry to examine unnecessary complexity and exclusion. Digital friction because someone has a disability, processes information differently, needs more time, relies on assistive technology or does not engage with information in the way its creator expected is incredibly ‘2010’. And not in the cute nostalgic way. Good accessibility gives more people the ability to participate. Period!
But this is where this Meta case study proves there’s another layer to the story. There is a meaningful difference between making it easier for someone to choose and making it easier for someone to continue without having to choose again. From the outside, both can appear to be examples of frictionless design. Their consequences, however, can be very different.
This is where accessibility and addictive design become uncomfortable neighbours. Both can talk about reducing cognitive load, simplifying decisions, improving discoverability, limiting effort and making pathways more intuitive. None of those principles is inherently good or bad. Their ethical character really depends on what they enable, who they affect and whose interests they ultimately serve. In Meta’s case they’re obvious. In your integrated campaign brief, less so. A simplified checkout can make purchasing easier for somebody with a cognitive disability. It can also make impulsive spending easier. A notification can be genuinely useful, but it can also be engineered to manufacture urgency. You see where I’m going with this. The issue is not that these features are inherently unethical. It is that intention, context and consequence matter. Accessibility is not really about making everything easier. At its best, it is about making agency more equitable.
Audit your work in the name of others
The goal should never be maximum consumption. It should be giving people a reasonable opportunity to decide what they want to do. No, you don’t suddenly need a qualification in developmental psychology, but our profession is far more deeply involved in behavioural influence than we sometimes acknowledge. We decide what gets noticed, what feels urgent, where the eye moves, what creates a sense of reward. For the most part, we’re praised for this. Praised by who? Usually Meta.
We influence behaviour for a living. Design and advertising has always done this. There is nothing inherently sinister about persuasion. Good advertising connects people with things they value. However I’m certainly excited about where this conversation will take us in the years to come, and how ‘addiction’ and ‘accessibility’ maintain their distance in design principles.
