Green Nudging in Platform-Mediated Sustainable Consumption: Ethical Boundaries and Governance Requirements

As consumption becomes increasingly mediated by digital platforms, green nudging has emerged as an important tool for promoting sustainable consumption. Platform green nudging is characterised by datafication, interface design, algorithmisation, and commercial embedding. These features reshape the choice architecture of sustainable consumption and may reduce the cognitive and behavioural costs associated with green choices. Yet they may also compress complex environmental practices into simple symbols, producing a green interface impression that exceeds what the available environmental evidence can support. This paper combines normative ethical analysis with an illustrative case analysis to examine the ethical boundaries of platform green nudging and to develop corresponding governance requirements. It argues that its ethical legitimacy should be assessed against welfare, transparency, and autonomy. Its goals should serve the environmental public good and consumers’ genuine interests; green information should be clear and substantiated; and consumers should retain room to understand, compare, reflect on, and refuse platform suggestions. Using Booking.com’s “Travel Sustainable” programme, the paper identifies transparency as the most clearly supported ethical risk, while welfare and autonomy concerns are treated primarily as structural risks requiring further empirical examination. It proposes evidentiary grounding, interface calibration, choice safeguards, and platform accountability to support credible green information, autonomous judgment, and long-term sustainable consumption.