Ethical Design for Social Media Platforms

For most of its history, social media design has followed a single, dominant philosophy: maximize engagement. Keep users scrolling longer, clicking more, and returning constantly – because more attention means more data, and more data means more revenue. But a growing body of scholarship and a wave of practical innovation are challenging this model at its root. The question being asked now is not just what can platforms do, but what should they do – and how should they be built to reflect that? This is the core of ethical design for social media.

What ethical design actually means 🔗

Ethical design is not a single feature or a policy update. It is a foundational philosophy that places human well-being, dignity, and rights above business metrics like profit and engagement. Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff, who coined the term “surveillance capitalism,” has argued that platforms like Google and Facebook have built their empires by treating human experience as raw material – harvesting behavioral data, packaging it into prediction products, and selling it to advertisers, all largely without meaningful user consent. In this model, the user is neither the customer nor the product; their actions and attention are the product.

Ethical design directly counters this. Where surveillance capitalism asks “how do we extract maximum value from users?”, ethical design asks “how do we build technology that genuinely serves them?” Research published in the Journal of Business Research confirms that a perceived lack of ethical design significantly increases user privacy concerns, and that many social media platforms use design features – from infinite scroll to default data-sharing settings – that are explicitly calibrated to modify user behavior for commercial gain rather than user benefit.

The ethical hierarchy of needs 🔗

The most practical framework for understanding what ethical design requires comes from Aral Balkan and Laura Kalbag, founders of the Small Technology Foundation. Their Ethical Design Manifesto organizes the principles of ethical technology into a pyramid – a hierarchy of needs, modeled deliberately on Maslow’s famous structure. As Smashing Magazine explains, if any layer of this pyramid is broken, the layers above it collapse. A platform cannot deliver a genuinely good user experience if it is built on a foundation that violates user rights.

Layer 1: Human rights – the non-negotiable foundation 🔗

The base of the pyramid is the most critical. According to the framework, technology that respects human rights must be decentralized, end-to-end encrypted, open-source where possible, accessible, and sustainable. It must protect civil liberties, reduce inequality, and support democracy. In practical terms for social media, this means a platform cannot track your location, scrape your contacts, or harvest your behavioral data without your fully informed, explicit, and enthusiastic consent. As the manifesto states clearly: if a platform is built on surveillance, it is unethical – no matter how polished its interface or engaging its features.

Layer 2: Human effort – technology that works for you 🔗

Once human rights are respected, the next layer demands that the technology actually function as a useful tool. Per the manifesto’s definition, technology that respects human effort is functional, convenient, and reliable – accommodating of different abilities and contexts, and respectful of the limited time users have. In social media terms, this rules out interfaces designed to be intentionally confusing, settings menus buried so deep that opting out of data collection is a chore by design, or algorithms that serve content users haven’t asked for because it generates more time-on-site.

Layer 3: Human experience – delight that’s actually earned 🔗

Only after a platform has secured the first two layers can it legitimately aim for the third: a human experience that is beautiful, engaging, and meaningful. This is where creativity in design lives – the visual polish, the smooth interactions, the features that feel genuinely delightful. But the manifesto is clear that this layer cannot compensate for failures below it. As The Week reports, Kalbag herself argues that platforms need “sensible, privacy-respecting default settings” before any talk of user experience is meaningful. A “fun” app that spies on you is not an ethical product – it is a well-disguised one.

Privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs): building ethics into the code 🔗

Principles are only as good as their implementation. This is where Privacy-Enhancing Technologies, or PETs, come in. Rather than adding privacy as an afterthought – a toggle buried in settings – PETs embed ethical considerations directly into a platform’s architecture from the start. They shift the default posture of a system from “collect everything unless told otherwise” to “protect everything unless the user actively chooses to share.”

A clear example is Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework, introduced with iOS 14.5 in April 2021. As Apple describes it, the framework requires any app that wants to track a user’s activity across other companies’ apps and websites to first display a prompt asking for explicit permission. The user sees a simple choice: allow tracking, or ask the app not to track. This shifts tracking from a hidden default to an active, conscious decision – directly operationalizing the human rights layer of the ethical pyramid. Before ATT, cross-app tracking happened invisibly unless a user knew to hunt for an opt-out buried in settings. After ATT, silence means no.

Another example is Signal, the messaging app. As design analysts have noted, Signal prioritizes user privacy through end-to-end encryption by default – setting a benchmark for what ethical data handling looks like when applied to communication platforms. No message metadata is sold, no behavioral profiles are built, and no engagement algorithms nudge users toward content that keeps them on the app longer.

The opt-in vs. opt-out debate 🔗

One of the most consequential design decisions a platform can make is deceptively simple: should data sharing be on by default, with users having to opt out? Or should it be off by default, requiring users to actively opt in? This is not a minor UX question – it determines the privacy outcomes for hundreds of millions of people.

Research published with the FTC found a 20 percentage point difference in tracking rates between platforms using opt-in versus opt-out approaches, with opt-in yielding significantly greater user privacy. This is precisely why major privacy legislation has moved toward mandating opt-in defaults. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), implemented in 2018, requires explicit, informed consent before personal data is processed for non-essential purposes like advertising – meaning silence or pre-ticked boxes do not constitute valid consent.

But legislation alone is not enough if platforms can bury consent mechanisms in complex language. A peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Strategic Marketing analyzed the privacy policies of Meta and Twitter and found that, given their length and reading complexity, it is unlikely that most users – especially minors – can genuinely comprehend what they are agreeing to. Informed consent, the study warns, cannot be assumed simply because a user clicked “I agree.” This makes the design of the consent mechanism itself an ethical act.

Addictive design vs. ethical design: a direct conflict 🔗

As researchers at Mindfultechnics document, many of the most common social media features – infinite scroll, “like” buttons, auto-refresh, algorithmic feeds – are not neutral conveniences. They are deliberate design choices calibrated to exploit psychological vulnerabilities, trigger dopamine responses, and maximize time on platform. Author Adam Alter, writing in Irresistible, explains that infinite scroll eliminates the natural stopping cues that would otherwise signal users to move on – making doomscrolling not a personal failure but an engineered outcome.

Ethical design confronts these choices directly. Ravi Iyer, a former Data Science and Product Manager at Meta, has argued that platforms should prioritize content quality over raw engagement – for instance, by letting users rate content substance rather than simply reacting to it, which shifts algorithmic incentives away from divisive or low-value viral content. He also notes that platform design – not government regulation of speech – is the more appropriate lever for creating safer digital environments, as it can regulate the structure and reach of content without directly censoring it.

Transparency about how algorithms work is equally central. Kalbag and others have pointed to platforms like Mastodon, which uses a chronological timeline rather than an algorithmic one – giving users direct control over what they see. Instagram’s move to allow users to adjust their own feed preferences is a step in this direction, though critics argue it remains limited relative to the platform’s broader engagement machinery.

The bigger picture: from tools to infrastructure 🔗

Ethical design is not just a technical challenge – it is a political and economic one. Kalbag has suggested that because social platforms have become essential infrastructure – as important to public life as telephone networks or public broadcasting – they may need to be funded differently, potentially through public or tax-based models, rather than exclusively through advertising revenue that incentivizes surveillance. Without a change in the underlying business model, ethical design choices will always be in tension with the commercial pressures that reward engagement over well-being.

As ethical design frameworks emphasize, the goal is not simply to comply with privacy regulations, but to build systems that proactively safeguard users – treating data protection as a core design value rather than a legal obligation to be minimally satisfied. This requires bringing ethicists, psychologists, and civil society representatives into the design process itself, not just into post-hoc compliance reviews.

What do you think? When you scroll through a social media platform today, how often do you feel like the design is working for you versus keeping you hooked for someone else’s benefit? And if platforms were required to use opt-in defaults for all data collection – rather than opt-out – do you think that would meaningfully change your relationship with them?

References

1. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/03/harvard-professor-says-surveillance-capitalism-is-undermining-democracy/
2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0148296321001545
3. https://ind.ie
4. https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/03/ethical-design-practical-getting-started-guide/
5. https://beta-i.com/ethical-design-what-is-it-and-why-is-it-important-for-innovators/
6. https://theweek.com/articles/799415/quest-design-ethical-social-media-platform
7. https://www.apple.com/privacy/control/
8. https://adapty.io/blog/app-tracking-transparency/
9. https://medium.com/@bangdesign/the-ethics-of-social-media-design-impact-on-user-behavior-59f360c291f9
10. https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/3-Skiera-Economic-Impact-of-Opt-in-versus-Opt-out-Requirements-for-Personal-Data-Usage.pdf
11. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0965254X.2023.2232817
12. https://mindfultechnics.com/reform-social-media-part-v-ethical-design-in-social-media/
13. https://eccles.utah.edu/news/ethically-designing-social-media/
14. https://fiveable.me/design-strategy-and-software/unit-11/ethical-design-principles/study-guide/mqFjVK6RsRxNVXHQ