According to the plea, the features are not the incidental by-product of engineering convenience but are deliberate design choices. (AI-generated Image)A professor at a law university in the national capital has filed a PIL in the Delhi High Court raising concerns over addictive design features of social media platforms and their impact on young users’ mental health and sought damages from Meta, Google, Telegram, X and Snapchat for being designed to be addictive and for the mental health issues caused by their features.The plea is likely to come up before the bench of Chief Justice Devendra Kumar Upadhyaya and Justice Tejas Karia.“That the fulcrum of the issue is not what content social media platforms carry, but how such platforms are architecturally designed to cause addiction through infinite scroll, autoplay, algorithmically curated and personalised feeds, notification systems and variable reward engagement metrics such as “likes” so as to capture, retain and repeatedly re-stimulate the attention of the user,” the PIL states.The plea raises a question as to whether the “design architecture” of various social media platforms, regardless of their content, requires examination by an appropriate expert body. The concern, according to the plea, has been raised particularly in Indian context as the statistics states that Indian youths between the ages of 18-24 spend more than 120 minutes daily on social media and furthermore “it has been clinically proven that long hours on social media have been linked to suicide and depression among adolescents”.Apart from seeking a direction to the social media platforms to “restrict prohibit, or regulate the use of the engagement maximising and addictive design, namely infinite scroll, autoplay, algorithmically curated feeds, persistent notifications”, the plea also urges the court to “lay down guidelines regulating such design features, to remain in operation until such time as legislature enacts a law occupying the field”.The plea further seeks compensation from the social media companies for “the harm already suffered by users, particularly children, on account of the engagement-maximising design features”.