EDRi files DSA complaint against YouTube for undermining user autonomy

EDRi has filed a complaint with the Belgian Digital Services Coordinator, the Institute for Postal Services and Telecommunications (BIPT) against YouTube under the Digital Service Act (DSA), challenging the legality of how the platform uses deceptive interface design to steer users towards its profiling-based recommender system. In the complaint, EDRi argues that YouTube also fails provide a genuinely accessible and meaningful alternative that is not based on profiling, as required by the DSA.

YouTube curates and ranks content primarily through a system that monitors and analyses user behaviour – including clicks, likes, shares, watch time, and interaction patterns – in order to predict and steer future behaviour. The platform uses this system to shape the information environment of billions of users. By continuously optimising its system for user engagement, YouTube influences what information users encounter, which content creators gain visibility or are buried, and which topics dominate the public conversation online.

Under the DSA, very large platforms must provide at least one recommender system that is not based on profiling. The intention behind this rule is to strengthen transparency and enhance user autonomy, as lawmakers recognised that recommendation systems exert powerful influence over public discourse and individual decision-making. Providing a non-profiling option was meant to ensure that users retain meaningful control over the kind of content they get recommend by online platforms.

However, the existence of an option on paper does not necessarily amount to meaningful choice in practice. While YouTube technically allows users to switch off its profiling-based recommender system, it does not really offer any alternative. Instead users who do switch off default recommendations are left with a blank screen and a deleted YouTube watch history.

What is more, making that switch is not easy. Users must navigate through multiple layers of settings, interpret technical terminology, and actively override default configurations. If profiling is the default setting and the non-profiling alternative is buried within complex menus, then the legal safeguard becomes largely symbolic. That is why the DSA explicitly prohibits online platforms from using deceptive design patterns and misleading users.

By combining profiling by default, inaccessible alternatives, and engagement-maximising design, YouTube fails to comply with its transparency and user empowerment obligations under the DSA. EDRi requests that the Digital Services Coordinator launches a thorough investigation into how YouTube addresses these obligations under the DSA and takes effective and timely enforcement measures. In particular:

• YouTube should be ordered to provide users with a recommender system alternative not based on profiling that serves as a genuine replacement for the default option.
• That non-profiling option must be easily accessible from YouTube’s front page or at most the first level of its app menu, and it must be well-explained and neutral in its wording and design.
• The non-profiling option must not be unnecessarily coupled with other YouTube functionalities such as YouTube History, in order to not discourage users from selecting it.
• YouTube should be ordered to stop deploying deceptive design patterns that nudge users who have already made a choice to go back to the default option preferred by the platform.
• Given YouTube’s size and the number of affected users, dissuasive monetary sanctions should be considered.