Addicted to the algorithm | Corporate Europe Observatory
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As the European Commission prepares a new Digital Fairness Act (DFA) to tackle addictive design of social media and other harmful digital practices, new research by Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) reveals intense lobbying by Big Tech and industry groups to block or water down meaningful measures against social media addiction.
  • European Commission officials met lobbyists more than 100 times on the Digital Fairness Act since December 2024. 83% of the lobby meetings that Commission top officials had on the DFA were with industry representatives, including 47 meetings with individual companies and 28 with business lobby groups. By contrast, less than 14% of these meetings were held with NGOs and trade unions.
  • Meta lobbyists presented misleading claims to the European Commission about the safety of Instagram for young women. These claims are contradicted by several recent independent studies as well as analyses of Meta’s own internal documents that have entered the public domain via whistleblowers and US court cases.
  • The Consumer Choice Center – a lobby group funded by Google and Meta – has launched a project called ‘EU Tech Loop’, which publishes articles on EU digital policies on the Euronews website. The content closely echoes Big Tech talking points, which raises questions about untransparent influencing via EU media spaces.
  • Beyond Big Tech’s lobbying firepower, the DFA is facing at least four other obstacles: the current obsession among EU decision-makers with industry competitiveness via deregulation, pressure from the Trump administration, the growing power of the far right in EU politics, and the tendency to limit debate on social media addiction to rules for minors.
  • Cherry@piefed.socialEnglish
    5·
    11 hours ago

    The consumer choice group. Yeh it’s for consumer choice. Not for google or meta. Greedy entitled monsters. I like that I am hearing the word addiction being used more and more in these conversations. It a good step. It feel like the 80s smoking was cool, till it wasn’t. The thing is social media come in many forms. So it’s not as simple as stopping the sale, but voicing it as an addictive force is a start.