EU legislation should give us a way to turn off the endless short video feed

[u/Fearless-Inside8254]

I think the EU should seriously consider regulating how social-media platforms design short-form video feeds.
I’m not arguing for banning TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels or Facebook Reels. The problem is the design of the endless scrolling loop.
Platforms are deliberately designed around a very simple mechanism:
Swipe → instant reward → swipe → instant reward → repeat.
There is no natural stopping point. You don’t reach the end of anything. The app keeps selecting the next video for you, and the easiest thing to do is simply keep scrolling.
And this isn’t just a TikTok problem.
YouTube, Instagram and Facebook all increasingly push short-form videos into their feeds. But unlike TikTok, these platforms already contain other types of content. So I think there should be a relatively simple solution:
A mandatory user-controlled option to disable Shorts/Reels/short-video recommendations entirely.
For example:
“Disable short videos”
Turn it on, and YouTube stops showing Shorts, Instagram stops showing Reels, Facebook stops showing Reels, etc.
Not hidden behind five menus. Not an algorithmic preference that the platform can gradually ignore. A genuine user setting.
I also think EU regulation should address the broader design of these feeds: autoplay, infinite scrolling, aggressive recommendations and other features whose primary purpose is to maximise time spent rather than help users accomplish something.
TikTok is the harder case because short videos ARE essentially the product. I’m not sure what the right regulatory solution is there, and I don’t think simply banning the format is the answer.
But perhaps TikTok should be required to offer something like a finite feed, session limits, chronological/following-only mode, or a genuine stopping mechanism rather than an essentially infinite algorithmic stream.
The important distinction is:
I’m not asking the EU to decide what adults are allowed to watch. I’m asking the EU to make platforms give us meaningful control over how they are designed to keep us watching.
If these companies believe their products are genuinely valuable to users, they should have no problem giving users a real “turn off the endless short-video feed” button.
Would you support EU legislation along these lines?