On a Tuesday afternoon in Brussels, a question that parents from Seoul to São Paulo have asked aloud for years received its most consequential official answer yet: could the way a social-media feed is built be, in itself, a form of harm? The European Commission believes so. In preliminary findings released this week, the Commission concluded that features such as infinite scroll, autoplay video and algorithmically personalised recommendations may actively encourage compulsive use — particularly among children and teenagers whose developing brains are especially vulnerable to habit-forming loops. The regulatory pressure carries real financial weight.

If Meta fails to make changes that the Commission considers adequate, the company could be fined as much as 6% of its total global annual turnover — a figure that, for one of the world's most profitable technology corporations, would run to billions of dollars. EU tech chief Henna Virkkunen stated plainly that protecting the physical and mental health of Europeans must be a priority for social-media platforms, signalling that Brussels regards this not as a technical compliance matter but as a public-health imperative. The Commission's critique goes beyond the obvious. It argued that Meta's own time-management tools — including those switched on by default for teenage users — can simply be dismissed by the user and therefore do not meaningfully reduce screen time.

Parental controls, it added, work only for parents who already possess the time and technical knowledge to navigate them properly. In short, the safeguards exist on paper more than in practice. Meta pushed back firmly, insisting that the Commission's findings do not accurately reflect the steps it has already taken. The company pointed to its Teen Accounts feature, which it says automatically restricts access to Instagram at night and allows parents to cap daily screen time at just 15 minutes.