Addiction, self-harm, suicide: Social media's engagement-driven strategy is under intense scrutiny for allegedly engineering compulsive use and severe psychological harm, especially in children.
Platforms like Facebook, YouTube and TikTok make huge profits by keeping users hooked via nonstop scrolling, recommendations and constant notifications.
Facebook owner Meta, for example, generated a record $196.2 billion (€168.3 billion) in advertising revenue last year, driven by its ability to keep people glued to their screens.
That business model is now facing major legal and regulatory roadblocks, with social media bans for people younger than 16 spreading globally and a growing wave of lawsuits, mainly in the United States.
In the latest major case, 29 states, including California, Colorado and New Jersey, sued Meta earlier this month, alleging that the social media giant designed its platforms to addict young users.
In a settlement announced on Wednesday, Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion to 47 states, the District of Columbia and US territories — including a separate $1 billion settlement with Texas. The platform also agreed to implement usage limits and to block teens from using its apps at night.
Social media growth outpaced regulation
Governments around the world have spent the past decade tightening rules, yet policymakers struggle to keep up with the rapidly changing technology.
Several major studies link social media use in teenagers to increased anxiety, depression and body dissatisfaction. Meanwhile, leaked documents from Meta in 2021 indicated that company researchers had identified links between Instagram use and body-image and mental health concerns among some teenage girls.
According to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, US teens in 2025 spent about 90 minutes a day glued to TikTok. Tests by groups like Amnesty International in 2023 showed that the platform's algorithm can recommend videos related to depression and self-harm to users who engage with mental health content.
"Companies operating at this scale, with so much influence over people's lives, have to meet basic safety standards," Camille Carlton, senior director of strategy and impact at the Center for Humane Technology, told DW.
"This isn't a radical idea," she said. "This is the same standard we apply to other products such as cars, medications and children's toys."
US move toward tighter child safety
After years of gridlock, bipartisan support in the US is growing for tougher rules to protect children from social media harms, through the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA).
The plans include the strongest safety settings by default for minors and will give parents more tools to control their children's accounts.
"The technology is advancing so fast, and the evidence of harm is mounting so fast, that I'm really optimistic that we're going to get major legislation passed in the next session of Congress," social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of the bestselling book "The Anxious Generation," told Politico's The Conversation podcast last week.
While KOSA could impose a clear duty of care on tech giants to anticipate foreseeable harm and design features to prevent them, Carlton is pushing lawmakers to place social media products under US consumer-protection and product-liability rules.
Support for alternative models — in theory
In Germany, Cornelia Sindermann, a psychology professor at Charlotte Fresenius Hochschule in Heidelberg, has been studying users' attitudes to alternative social media models.
These include pure subscription plans to avoid ads, which Meta has been testing on Facebook and Instagram in the 27-member EU and the United Kingdom.
Sindermann's 2024 research also found that more than half of adults and two-thirds of adolescents would be willing to pay for a public-service version of, say, Facebook, with much stronger guardrails.
While social media platforms will likely "reinvent aspects of their business models and test additional revenue streams," Sindermann told DW she is "doubtful" that these alternatives will replace the most popular social platforms.
AI investment complicates regulation
Another issue for policymakers is that the same social media platforms used by billions are the ones pouring hundreds of billions into top-tier artificial intelligence (AI) projects.
Some analysts argue that social-media data provides valuable real-world behavioral data for AI development.
As these tech giants grow ever more powerful, their new AI businesses are proving just as difficult to regulate. Experts are increasingly concerned that the same flawed practices that shaped social media are now being built into far more powerful AI products.
So, while social media fights for our attention, AI is now positioned to influence human thought, behavior and relationships in ways that are difficult to imagine, noted Carlton.
"When the incentives driving a product are misaligned with human well-being, we can't expect companies to consistently prioritize the public interest on their own," warned Carlton.
