Roundup: Targeting platforms’ addictive design

Earlier this week, the European Union announced they were investigating Temu. The company is accused of selling illegal products, including counterfeit goods, but the aspect of the investigation that stood out to me was the desire to look into the “addictive design” and aggressive sales tactics that dominate Temu’s platform.

I can’t say I’ve ever bought anything from Temu, but the company is known for using aggressive discounting and many other strategies in the design of its app, website, and communications strategy to try to push customers to complete a sale. While there’s good reason to look at the products being sold through its platform, I think targeting the design of the platform itself is a welcome development and something that should be happening on a much greater scale.

We’ve already seen a growing concern from bodies like the US Surgeon General calling for warning labels on social media or the World Health Organization calling for a much more comprehensive plan of regulating social media and digital devices like was done with tobacco in decades past. In the United States, Meta and TikTok are already being sued over the design of their platforms and the goal of getting people — particularly minors — hooked on them.

We’ve long known that app developers at major tech companies like Meta looked to the gambling industry to learn how to keep people hooked on their platforms, using design tricks to create dopamine responses to keep people engaged and keep them coming back. That included everything from how social media timelines work to when to send notifications. Sometimes, this is taken to an extreme, like in the Social Dilemma documentary of a few years ago, to suggest that tech companies are controlling people’s minds — I think that’s ridiculous, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t serious reasons to be concerned about the design of these platforms and the broader effects of social media and smartphones more broadly.

In the past, it was easier to believe that these technologies were having a net positive impact. There’s no denying they’ve allowed us to be more connected with the people we know and have enabled a new form a digital socialization. But over the past few years we’ve not just woken up to the harms that have always been there, but also how the constant pressure for companies to increase their revenues and profits has further degraded the positive aspects of those platforms. Not to mention how many of their owners have implicitly (if not explicitly) granted conspiracy theories and the extreme right free rein to pollute the information environment.

It’s gotten so bad that a response is clearly necessary — the question is how far it should go. In my view, looking at platform design is a great place to start, but likely not where it should end.

In the roundup this week, you’ll find some recommended reads on the horrors of the Musk-funded canvassing effort for Donald Trump, Kenya’s recent decision to give the Gates Foundation legal immunity, and the problem with digital nomads. Plus, the usual labor updates and other tech news you might have missed.

Over on Tech Won’t Save Us, I spoke to Jacob Silverman about what we learned about tech billionaires during the US election cycle and what either potential outcome of Tuesday’s vote might mean for Silicon Valley moving forward. The final episode of my series Data Vampires also came out on Monday!

Later this week I’ll be in Marseille for an interesting event called La nuage était sous nos pieds, then the following week I’ll be in Madrid to speak on a panel for the launch of the Labour International.

Have a great week!

— Paris