Social Media Addiction and the Digital Services Act: Mitigation Measures or Missed Opportunities? An Intra-Active Critique

This paper critiques the European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) for enacting a mechanistic conception of platform addiction—one that treats harm as isolated and isolatable or traceable to specific interface features and addressable through transparency tools and user-facing toggles. Drawing on Karen Barad’s concepts of intra-action and diffraction, the paper reframes addiction not as a bounded phenomenon but as a relatant: an emergent, relational process constituted through neurological, psychosocial, algorithmic, and infrastructural entanglements. Through analysis of four dominant models of addiction and the predictive logic of recommender systems, it shows that the DSA misapprehends the ontological structure of the harm it seeks to regulate. The paper proposes that age-based restrictions may offer a more materially attuned intervention, but warns—through a diffractive ethics—against imagining such measures as ontologically neutral. Regulation, it argues, should be rethought not as external control, but as an ongoing participant in the becoming of what it aims to govern.