EU Wants Addictive Designs Should Be Removed By Meta

The European Union (EU) has accused Meta last 10 July of breaching its social media law by designing Facebook and Instagram to get users hooked, and demanded it disable "key addictive features" like infinite scrolling.

The EU's executive arm issued a fresh set of charges against Meta Platforms as part of its investigation under the 27-nation bloc's strict digital rule book known as the Digital Services Act. The sweeping set of regulations from Brussels requires tech platforms to protect internet users under threat of hefty fines.

The European Commission said Meta failed to properly assess the risks its design features pose to the physical and mental health of users, including minors. And while the company has tools and controls to help manage Facebook and Instagram use, it said they were easily overridden, dismissed, or technically challenging to use.

Meta "needs to implement design changes" to Instagram and Facebook, such as disabling "key addictive features" like autoplay of videos and infinite scroll so they're not turned on by default, the commission said in its preliminary findings.

Meta now has the chance to respond and defend itself before the commission issues its final decision, which could result in a fine worth up to 6% of the company's global annual revenue.

Meta said that the preliminary findings do not recognize the steps that the company has already taken to protect teens.

"Since this investigation began, we rolled out Teen Accounts that automatically protect teens and put parents in control - allowing them to block access to Instagram at night and cap daily screen time at just 15 minutes," Meta said in a prepared statement. "We share the European Commission's commitment to providing teens with safe, positive online experiences and will continue to engage constructively with them."

Europe is committed to enforcing its legislation that holds platforms accountable for addictive design features, said Henna Virkkunen, an executive vice-president at the commission overseeing tech.

"Protecting the physical and mental health of Europeans must be a priority for social media platforms," Virkkunen said in a written statement.

Facebook and Instagram design features, including personalized recommendations and push notifications, serve up an endless stream of content, putting users' brains on "autopilot" and fueling compulsive use, the commission said. Meanwhile, screen time controls that parents can impose on their teens' devices can be "easily dismissed" and don't result in a meaningful reduction of use, the commission said. And the controls are undermined by the technical expertise, time and effort that parents need to understand and use them, it said. The commission's proposed design changes also included finding better ways to encourage screen time breaks, and changing the content recommendation system so that it's less "engagement-oriented."

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The Effects Of Australia's Social Media Law

Australia's new social media law took effect last 10 December 2025, raising the age to open or maintain social media accounts to 16. It was a global first. The law called for the biggest social media platforms to do more than just ask for a birthdate. Now, they would be legally required to take responsibility for verifying and enforcing an age minimum.

Half a year on, the world is watching closely. Are the restrictions working?

Some critics and media outlets have prematurely concluded that the policy has failed. They point to early surveys showing that under-16 social media use has fallen only partially, and that most kids are still accessing social media. And they argue that age limits will never work, that these laws miss the real problem of harmful platform design, and that the countries considering following Australia—of which there are many—should reconsider.

The truth is far more encouraging. There are several promising trends that other countries are now building upon, reflecting the importance of Australia's pioneering policies.

It started with a relatively smooth rollout. All 10 platforms took steps to verify users' ages and remove accounts of those under 16. Now, fewer kids in the land down under are using social media, and more than a dozen other countries, including Indonesia, Canada, Malaysia, the UAE, France, Spain, and the U.K., are beginning their own journeys to rein in social media.

The world is, and should, follow Oz's lead.

When Australia's law went into effect last December, 10 social media platforms—Facebook, Kick, Reddit, Threads, TikTok, Twitch, Instagram, Snapchat, X, and YouTube—removed 4.7 million under-16 accounts belonging to an estimated 2.5 million Aussies between the ages of eight and 15.

To be sure, that does not mean that these kids can't access social media altogether, since many likely have several accounts across platforms. But it shows that the law made immediate progress and compelled platforms to take action on a massive scale.

Still, some have said that this decline is too modest, suggested that kids could also be finding workarounds, and concluded that therefore, the law is failing. So let's look more closely at the numbers.

Several early studies indicate that social media use and account ownership among Australian children under 16 declined between 9 percent and 40 percent. To understand this wide variation between studies, it's important to know what Australia's social media age minimum actually does.

The law prevents those under the age of 16 from creating or keeping accounts on covered platforms by limiting the age at which minors can sign the contract required to open an account and consent to share their data via a terms of service.

Some studies examine account ownership, others measure actual usage, and still others focus on either individual platforms or multiple platforms combined, leading to substantial variation in the results of different studies.

The law does not eliminate children's access to social media content. That is because it was never designed to. Account-based access—and the data the user agrees to share with the platform upon sign-up—is the vehicle for many of the worst social media harms that children experience, such as late-night notifications, interactions with anonymous strangers, posting one's images online, "like" counts, and algorithmic recommendations designed to maximally "engage" or addict that particular child.

For this reason, studies that measure whether a kid has access to any platform, whether an underage user is using an account or not, will greatly underestimate the law's effects.

So social media use among Australian kids has declined somewhat. And while disappointment about the rate and speed of decline is understandable, it ultimately misunderstands how the law was crafted.

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OpenAI Reported A Security Breach Inside Hugging Face System

OpenAI admitted last 21 July that one of its AI models breached the systems of Hugging Face, the unaffiliated AI hosting platform, during an internal cybersecurity test that went awry. The models reportedly escaped their isolated testing environment and reached Hugging Face's systems from there. Hugging Face initially attributed the breach to an "external AI agent."

In a blog post published Tuesday afternoon, OpenAI detailed the steps that led the models to compromise the service.

"After investigating, we now know that this particular incident was driven by a combination of OpenAI models — including GPT‑5.6 Sol and an even more capable pre-release model, all with reduced cyber refusals for evaluation purposes — while being internally tested on a benchmark⁠ of cyber capabilities," the post reads.

In particular, the breach appears to have focused on ExploitGym, a publicly hosted benchmark measuring models' ability to execute attacks based on existing vulnerabilities. Benchmarks like ExploitGym are commonly used in model training to refine specific skills, but this is the first known incident in which that testing resulted in an actual cyberattack.

In this case, the model in question should not have even had internet access, outside of a specific tool that enabled models to install software packages they might need to complete their task. Instead, the model was able to find an undisclosed vulnerability in the package-installer program, which it used to access the broader internet at will.

"The models were hyperfocused on finding a solution for ExploitGym, going to extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal," OpenAI's post reads. "After gaining Internet access, the models inferred that Hugging Face potentially hosted models, datasets and solutions for ExploitGym. Knowing this, the model searched for and successfully found ways to gain access to secret information that it could use to cheat the evaluation."

Ultimately, the models found vulnerabilities in Hugging Face's infrastructure that allowed them to "obtain test solutions directly from Hugging Face's production database," effectively providing the answers to the benchmark.

For Hugging Face, the apparent result was a sophisticated and aggressive cyberattack, with "many thousands of individual actions across a swarm of short-lived sandboxes, with self-migrating command-and-control staged on public services," as the company stated in its initial disclosure.

OpenAI has identified and reported the vulnerabilities in the package installer and is working with Hugging Face to investigate the incident further. The company also said it would implement new controls on both model testing and the related infrastructure, meant to prevent similar incidents in the future.

It's unclear whether OpenAI will face any legal consequences as a result of the breach, although it's likely that the models' actions violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Nevertheless, the result is an unusually vivid illustration of the power and dangers of frontier AI models operating on long time horizons. As OpenAI researcher Micah Carroll posted in response to the news, "If this doesn't convince you that misalignment risks are going to be a key concern going forward, I don't know what will."

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Meta Abandons AI Image Feature Only Days After Launch

Meta said last 9 July that it is discontinuing an AI feature launched this week that ‌allowed users to generate images using public Instagram accounts, after drawing ‌widespread criticism over privacy concerns, including from a Hollywood union.

"Our intent was to provide a useful creative tool and to give people control over whether their public content could be referenced in this way," Meta said in a statement.

"We've heard the feedback that this feature missed the mark, so it's no longer available," it said.

Meta, owner of Facebook ‌and Instagram, had launched ⁠Muse Image on Tuesday, its first image-generation model from Meta Superintelligence Labs. The feature, integrated into its Meta AI chatbot, can ⁠use photos as input and lets users edit generated images directly through sketches.

The feature soon faced backlash over privacy concerns and being an automatic opt-in for users.

Emmy-winning actor Hannah Einbinder, known for "Hacks," criticized the feature on Instagram, saying it had been turned ‌on automatically and urging users to turn it off.

SAG-AFTRA, the union representing actors and other media professionals, also urged members and other Instagram users on Thursday to opt out of the feature.

"Anything other than a clear and conspicuous opt-in for these types of uses of Instagram users' images is unacceptable, and an utter ‌miscalculation of public sentiment regarding the obvious dangers and harms inherent in such use," SAG-AFTRA said.

Following Meta's decision to remove the feature, SAG-AFTRA welcomed the move.

"With the dangers of nonconsensual digital ‌replicas well known to all, a feature that encouraged that behavior is unwise. We appreciate its discontinuance. It is the responsible thing to do," a union spokesperson said.

The reversal reflects increasing pressure on technology companies to give users clear ‌control over how their publicly shared content is used by AI features.

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Discord Blames AI Moderation For Wrongfully Banning Users

Discord has admitted that a bug in its AI moderation system mistakenly banned more than 8,000 users over the past two months, after harmless images—including spreadsheets, chessboards, game textures, as well as white and gray transparent backgrounds — were incorrectly flagged as harmful content.

The company confirmed that the issue had been affecting accounts since May, with an additional 200 users banned over the weekend before its team identified and fixed the problem. All affected accounts are currently in the process of being restored.

The incident highlights one of the growing challenges surrounding AI-assisted moderation as many platforms increasingly rely on automated systems to identify illegal or abusive material at scale.

In a detailed thread on X, Discord explained that its automated safety system works by matching uploaded content against databases of known harmful material. While the technology is designed to catch illegal content, the company acknowledged that it can sometimes generate false positives. A human moderator reviews the content, but a bug caused the system to immediately ban affected accounts.

"We're working on better safeguards so this can't happen again," the company wrote.

This weekend, our safety systems incorrectly triggered and banned around 200 accounts. Everyone affected has been reinstated.

Here's what happened. A thread 🧵 https://t.co/wXH32iiv8I

— Discord Support (@discord_support) July 7, 2026

Across X and Reddit, users have claimed they had been permanently suspended simply for uploading images containing square grid patterns. Several users speculated that Discord's AI moderation tools have become increasingly sensitive to grid-like patterns because they have previously been used in attempts to obscure or disguise NSFW and child exploitation content from automated detection systems.

Affected users have been expressing frustration on social media, with some arguing that permanent account bans based solely on automated detection can have serious consequences, particularly for users who rely on Discord for work, gaming communities, or long-distance social connections.

"Losing a Discord account to something as unfair as this can be extremely devastating and affect users severely, and every day millions of users are affected by false AI bans. This needs to be stopped," one X user wrote.

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