Towards a Legal Concept of Digital Well-Being
The European Commission's preliminary finding on TikTok’s addictive design from last month might be a game-changer for protecting users’ digital well-being under EU law. The Commission’s focus moves beyond illegal content on the platform to the design of the platform itself. For the DSA to make this enforceable, “digital well-being” needs to be operationalised in a way that regulators and platforms can actually measure and mitigate. This blog post begins with the Commission's findings to advance the first steps toward a theory of digital well-being within the EU platform regulation framework.
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Just One More Video…
On 6 February 2026, the European Commission disclosed its long-awaited preliminary findings regarding its investigation into whether TikTok, the social media platform used by 170 million people across the European Union, is in breach of the Digital Services Act. The announcement occurs at a time when political and public concerns about the potential harmful impact of social media platforms are at an all-time high, leading to calls to “ban” children and teenagers from those spaces in countries across the world. As “addictive” features are central to concerns leading to these contested calls, the potential of the Digital Services Act to change platform design is crucial.
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Art. 21 DSA Has Come to Life
Art. 21 DSA is a new, unusual and interesting framework to settle disputes over online content moderation decisions. By now, the first four online dispute settlement bodies (ODS-bodies) have been certified, and most of them have already started taking cases. In this article, based on recent interviews with representatives from all certified bodies, I will explore how these very first ODS-bodies are set up and which very first experiences they have made.
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