Brazil Banned Addictive Design. The Crucial Regulatory Choices Are Still Ahead. | TechPolicy.PressPerspective<br>Brazil Banned Addictive Design. The Crucial Regulatory Choices Are Still Ahead.<br>Victor Oliveira Fernandes / May 28, 2026Victor Oliveira Fernandes serves as Brazil's National Secretary for Digital Rights. The analysis and opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not represent the official position of the Brazilian government or any of its agencies, including the National Data Protection Authority.<br>Shutterstock

This March, Brazil implemented one of the world's most ambitious regulatory frameworks for addictive design. Decree 12,880/2026, which implements the country's Digital Statute of Children and Adolescents (the ECA Digital), is no aspirational document. Articles 9 and 10 ban specific design features, including infinite scroll, autoplay, time-based rewards, excessive notifications, obstruction of privacy controls and exploitation of cognitive vulnerabilities. Penalties can reach up to 10% of a company's group revenue in Brazil, capped at R$50 million per violation.<br>The framework is genuinely distinctive. It departs from the US approach, where addictive-design regulation has advanced primarily through state attorneys general and high-profile jury verdicts, while federal legislation remains stalled in Congress. It also differs from the European approach, where the European Commission is targeting additive design under the Digital Services Act systemic risk enforcement provisions.<br>By concentrating enforcement authority in a technical body, the Brazilian Model spares plaintiffs from proving individual harm and standardizes obligations across sectors. The promise, however, is not guaranteed. Whether the regime lives up to its potential will depend on the regulatory choices the National Data Protection Agency (ANPD) must make in the coming months.<br>A separate but equally vital question — how public enforcement will interact with private litigation, civil society and the Public Prosecutor's Office, all presupposed by Decree 12,880/2026's multi-actor architecture — deserves separate treatment. The focus here is on two foundational choices that fall to the ANPD: who the regime covers in practice, and how it will be enforced.<br>Who does the law cover, and how?<br>The first challenge is one of scope. The ANPD must decide not only which entities fall under the addictive-design prohibitions, but also how each prohibition applies to the very different services covered by the regime. In several respects, the agency will break new ground.<br>The ECA Digital carries a distinctive duality: It is at once more restrictive and more sweeping than other digital services legislation, such as the DSA. It is more restrictive because it aims exclusively at minors. But it is also more sweeping because it reaches beyond online intermediation platforms: the law applies to "every information-technology product or service" directed at children or to which access by children is likely, covering internet applications, software, operating systems, app stores and connected games (Article 2, Digital ECA). Article 11 of the decree 12,880/2026 extends further still, reaching large language models (LLMs), conversational agents and similar AI interfaces and imposing a duty to "prevent the behavioral manipulation" of minors.<br>The broad scope will produce debates in two distinct regulatory spheres. The first involves the major online platforms — such as social networks, marketplaces — already grappling with addictive-design questions before US courts and European regulators. The second involves a vast array of services that escape comparative legislation altogether, from casual games and wellness apps to AI-based conversational interfaces.<br>In the first sphere, the central question is whether the prohibitions extend to features primarily used by adults. Social networks are illustrative. The decree exempts age verification requirements when a platform offers versions stripped of prohibited content — the so-called teen accounts (Art. 19, I). It remains unclear whether the ban applies only to those variants or to the main product as well. The distinction is significant: A recommendation system that operates identically for all users may still produce uniquely addictive effects on minors who circumvent age barriers, and a teen account, while a poorly calibrated teen account, may reproduce the same features in a milder form.<br>For marketplaces, the issue takes a different form. Many deploy urgent-discount messaging, sales pressure and gamification — practices now under scrutiny in the European Commission's February DSA investigation into Shein. Read alongside Article 10 of the decree, such practices would fall within the prohibition on "exploiting cognitive vulnerabilities."

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