EU Issues Preliminary DSA Ruling Against TikTok’s ‘Infinite Scroll’ Design

Regulators have occasionally moved from policing speech to redesigning the medium itself—think of the U.S. 1968 Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards that forced carmakers to install seatbelts, or the 1990 U.K. ban on toy ads during children’s TV hours. The EU’s action signals a comparable pivot: algorithms now stand where unsafe chassis once did. It also fits a two-decade trajectory in which Brussels—through GDPR (2018) and the DMA/DSA (2024)—uses market access to export safety norms, often clashing with U.S. laissez-faire attitudes and Chinese platform ownership. If upheld, the ruling could normalize state oversight of attention-harvesting design worldwide, nudging social media toward regulated public utilities. On a 100-year scale, it may mark an early moment when digital architecture, like food, drugs, or automobiles before it, became subject to mandatory safety engineering rather than voluntary best practice.