The EU Wants Meta to Switch Off Infinite Scroll. Where Does Malaysia Stand?

Anyone who has opened Instagram to check one thing and surfaced 40 minutes later knows the feeling. This week the European Union put a name to it, and a price tag on it. The European Commission said its investigation found that Meta's autoplay, infinite scroll and heavily personalised feeds are addictive by design, and told the company to fix them or face serious fines.

According to the Commission, "Meta did not adequately assess the risks of its addictive design on the physical and mental wellbeing of users, including minors and vulnerable adults." These features, it said, "shift the brain into autopilot mode" and feed compulsive use. Brussels wants Meta to turn off autoplay and infinite scroll by default, build in real screen-time breaks, and retune its recommendation engine so it is less hungry for your attention.

The stakes are not small. Under the Digital Services Act, if Meta fails to comply, the penalty can climb to 6 percent of its global annual turnover. Europe may push further still: an expert panel was due to hand the Commission findings that could open the door to a Europe-wide social media ban for teenagers. Meta disagrees, pointing to its Teen Accounts and a 15-minute daily cap. The Commission called those tools weak, noting that parental controls only work when parents have both the time and the technical skill to set them up. In the United States, Meta separately faces a lawsuit from 29 states over youth addiction that could seek penalties close to the company's entire market value.

For Malaysian readers, the obvious question is whether any of this reaches us. Malaysia is not without its own rules. The Online Safety Act 2025 came into force on 1 January, and since then any platform with more than eight million Malaysian users has been treated as licensed by the MCMC, whether it applied or not.

But the two approaches are pointed at different targets. Malaysia's law leans on harmful content and access. It defines nine categories of harmful content, requires licensed platforms to file an annual digital safety plan, carries penalties of up to RM10 million per breach, and is moving toward barring under-16s from opening accounts, with age checks possibly tied to MyKad or the MyDigital ID. What it does not yet do, in the direct way Brussels is attempting, is regulate the design mechanics themselves: the autoplay, the bottomless feed, the recommender tuned to keep you scrolling.

That gap matters, because the pull is just as real here. One study of university students in Selangor found that more than seven in ten showed signs of social media addiction. Age gates and content takedowns treat the symptoms. The EU's move goes after the delivery system. And there is a quiet upside for Malaysians in that: global platforms usually ship one product to the world rather than building a separate version per country, so if Brussels forces a less addictive Facebook and Instagram by default, a calmer feed may land on our phones too, without a single line of local law changing.

The other possibility is that Europe becomes the template. Malaysian regulators have shown before that they will borrow from tougher jurisdictions when it suits them. If the addictive-design case holds up in Europe, do not be surprised to see "switch off infinite scroll" surface in the next revision of Malaysia's online safety rules. For now, the fastest screen-time break still belongs to you: the one where you put the phone down.

Images courtesy of Gilles Lambert and Solen Feyissa on Unsplash.