Why a law professor wants ban on ‘addictive’ social media designs harming Indian children

The plea is likely to come up before the bench of Chief Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya and Justice Tejas Karia.

“That the fulcrum of the issue is not what content social media platforms carry, but how such platforms are architecturally designed to cause addiction through infinite scroll, autoplay, algorithmically curated and personalised feeds, notification systems and variable reward engagement metrics such as “likes” so as to capture, retain and repeatedly re-stimulate the attention of the user,” the PIL states.

‘Indian youth more addicted’

The plea raises a question as to whether the “design architecture” of various social media platforms, regardless of their content, requires examination by an appropriate expert body. The concern, according to the plea, has been raised particularly in the Indian context as the statistics state that Indian youths between the ages of 18 and 24 spend more than 120 minutes daily on social media and “it has been clinically proven that long hours on social media have been linked to suicide and depression among adolescents”.

It said a platform’s features are not an incidental byproduct of engineering convenience but are deliberate design choices, “consciously engineered to maximise user engagement and thereby advertising revenue, without regard to the psychological and physiological consequences visited upon the users.”

According to the plea, India has not yet developed a specific law differentiating platform design architecture from platform content and existing laws address only “unlawful or harmful content” rather than platform design.

The plea further mentioned some foreign laws and legislative measures to demonstrate that a distinction between platform content and platform design was “legally workable” and had been tested in other places. 

Apart from seeking a direction to social media platforms to “restrict prohibit, or regulate the use of the engagement maximising and addictive design, namely infinite scroll, autoplay, algorithmically curated feeds, persistent notifications”, the plea also urges the court to “lay down guidelines regulating such design features, to remain in operation until such time as legislature enacts a law occupying the field”.

The plea further seeks compensation from social media companies for “the harm already suffered by users, particularly children, on account of the engagement-maximising design features”.