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autoexec | on: The UK's war on anonymity has come to America
What I'd recommend is research on specific behaviors taken by social media companies to determine which are shown to cause harms. Some of that is already done by the companies themselves. If, for example, infinite scrolling is seen as a practice that increases addiction to the platforms, a law can be passed that makes it illegal to implement infinite scrolling. A law like that is pretty easy to explain and understand. TikTok was called out for sending push notifications to children's phones late at night to drive compulsive consumption and disrupt sleep patterns. Laws can be passed to limit how many unsolicited push notifications platforms can send and during which hours. Laws like that focus on the actual problems themselves, regardless of which platform is doing it, or who they are doing it to.
Tostino | parent
So let's say I have a business SaaS application, am I banned from showing content in an infinite scroll window? How would I prove my application is targeted for business users and not actually targeting children?

Not saying these are impossible questions to answer or get right in a law, just that there are more things to think about than which component you decide to show data inside.

autoexec | root | parent
You wouldn't have to prove that you were or weren't targeting children. You'd just have to operate a social media platform and allow infinite scrolling.

The law would define a social media platform. Maybe something like: The term “social media platform” means a website or internet medium that— (A) permits a person to become a registered user, establish an account, or create a profile for the purpose of allowing users to create, share, and view user-generated content through such an account or profile; (B) enables 1 or more users to generate content that can be viewed by other users of the medium; and (C) primarily serves as a medium for users to interact with content generated by other users of the medium. [https://www.law.cornell.edu/definitions/uscode.php?def_id=42...]

If your SaaS app met that definition of a social media platform it would be illegal for you to show content in an infinite scroll window. Because your application targeted business users who paid for the service, people would be less likely to sue you. Maybe it'd be worth it to you to include infinite scroll anyway. Companies knowingly break the law all the time after calculating that even on the off chance they get caught the fines they'd face will probably be less than the profit they'd make. The larger your platform got, the less worth it breaking the law could become and of course if the public felt the fines were so low as to be ineffective, the law could be amended to increase the fines.

The law could even allow some platforms to include harmful content like infinite scrolling if certain conditions are met. For example, platforms could be allowed to include infinite scrolling if they require a credit card to sign up, and they display a warning explaining that the platform uses infinite scrolling which has been determined to be harmful by promoting addictive and compulsive behaviors, and it provides an option to disable that feature. Still, it's probably better to widely ban those kinds of practices that serve no purpose other than driving engagement/addictive behavior. We can just decide as a society that we value people's mental health more than maximizing tech billionaire profits.

inigyou | root | parent
The EU has been pretty successful with rough definitions and "I know it when I see it". The Digital Markets Act just specifies which specific companies are too powerful and need to be regulated, and a process for adding more.
autoexec | root | parent
I'll give them credit for doing a much better job than the US does. I still think they could go a lot farther. There was tons of praise for GDPR as having actual teeth, but there are still companies who are getting fined again and again and again because the violations of the law are making more money for them than the fines they have to pay when they get caught.