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September 3, 2026

Sweet Dreams Are Made of This: Three Features That Put a Child on the Bottom Line

For some background music when reading this post, we encourage you to (re)discover the Eurythmics performing “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”. The previous post in this series, You Spin Me Round, took the three features built to keep a child scrolling: the feed that never ends, the video that plays itself, and the notification built for return. The proposed fix was to switch off the harmful pattern by default, with the possibility to switch...

Blog Post, digital rights, internet policy, technology
September 1, 2026

You Spin Me Round: Three Features Built to Keep a Child in the Loop

For some background music when reading this post, we encourage you to (re)discover Dead or Alive performing "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)". The opening post in this series, Non, a Ban Is Not a Plan, described how the French Conseil constitutionnel struck down the under-15 ban because the legislator had set out to address the risks posed by certain features of social media services and then wrote a rule about the user’s age...

Blog Post, digital rights, internet policy, technology
August 27, 2026

Non, a Ban Is Not a Plan: France Struck Down the Ban, Meta Settled on Features

For some background music when reading this post, we encourage you to (re)discover Michel Polnareff’s “La poupée qui fait non”. France adopted its under-15 social media ban on 21 July 2026 but hit a major roadblock a few weeks before its prohibition was due to take effect. The Conseil constitutionnel censured the central provision of the ban on 14 August, and the reasoning for its “Non” travels far beyond France. While the court did accept...

Blog Post, digital rights, European policy, internet policy, technology
July 8, 2026

Zero Knowledge, Full Record: Age Verification And The Infrastructure The Privacy Label Ignores

The “privacy-preserving age verification” label should be understood at two separate levels: on the one hand, it accurately describes a mechanism, yet on the other, it misleadingly describes a system. The protection it refers to covers a single exchange between a user and a website; the infrastructure that makes that exchange work requires knowing who the user is. The former may be preserving privacy, but the latter certainly doesn’t. That distinction has consequences. The label...

Blog Post, digital rights, technology
June 10, 2026

“Panic First, Evidence Later”? Surely That’s Not How We Do It in the EU!

At a roundtable in early June that brought together children's rights experts, child safety researchers, and policymakers, not a single researcher present expressed support for a social media age ban. When a policymaker announced his country was about to introduce one on the strength of the scientific evidence, the sighs from the researchers in the room were audible. The gap between what the science shows and what is being legislated in its name has...

May 20, 2026

Don’t Be Fooled: What Australia Calls a Social Media Delay Is Actually a Triple Ban

The word "delay" is doing a great deal of work right now. Not only in Australia, but also in Brussels. On 12 May 2026, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen addressed the European Summit on Artificial Intelligence and Children in Copenhagen. She called for action. She cited platform addiction, algorithmic harm, and the exposure of children to distressing content. The speech was substantive, and it landed. But it also contained a word choice that...

Blog Post, digital rights, internet policy
May 6, 2026

Zlonk! What a Los Angeles Jury Found That Fifty Years of Research Could Not – Part 3

This is Part 3 of a three-part series. Part 1 examined the five-century history of media moral panics and why the smartphone debate fits that template imperfectly. Part 2 traced the engineering logic behind algorithmic feeds back to the television scheduling techniques of the 1970s and 1980s.  On 25 March 2026, a Los Angeles Superior Court jury found Meta and Google legally liable for the depression, body dysmorphia, and suicidal ideation suffered by a plaintiff...

Blog Post, digital rights, internet policy
April 29, 2026

Zap! What Television Programmers Invented and Silicon Valley Perfected – Part 2

This is Part 2 of a three-part series. Part 1 examined the five-century history of media moral panics and why the smartphone debate fits that template imperfectly. Part 3 will look at what a US jury found that the science could not yet prove.  The accusation at the centre of the heavily publicised lawsuit against Meta and Google is that their platforms were deliberately engineered to be addictive, that this was known internally, and that...

Blog Post, digital rights, internet policy
April 22, 2026

Kapow! Batman, Robin, and the template of moral panic – part 1

This is Part 1 of a three-part series. Part 2 will examine how the engineering logic of television scheduling became the algorithmic logic of social media feeds. Part 3 will look at what a US jury found that the science could not yet prove. Every generation convinces itself that its children are the first to be broken by a new medium. Every generation is wrong in roughly the same way. The debate over smartphones and...

Blog Post, digital rights, internet policy
April 15, 2026

Is a (Social Media) Ban a Plan? We Built a Repository to Find Out.

The question has been ricocheting around European policy corridors for over a year. Australia banned social media for under-16s. France, Austria, Spain, Denmark, and Norway are moving in the same direction. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has declared that "parents, not algorithms, should be raising our children." And in Brussels, the word "ban" has acquired the quality of a policy position in itself: something that sounds decisive even when the evidence for...

Blog Post, digital rights, media lab