Dark Patterns: When Design Harms Your Health
A glowing button, artificial hurdles to canceling, the grab for phone contacts. With social media, we don’t pay with money, but with our time and personal data.
This takes a toll on our health: our well-being and mental health suffer, and loneliness grows. Willpower doesn’t help much—over 90 percent of people fail to break these patterns, even when they’re aware of them. Thomas therefore calls for rules that apply to everyone and designs a social network with no profit motive. He’s still a fan of social media, though; he talks about a Facebook group where two female doctors advise migraine patients. His takeaway: Giving up autonomy is okay, as long as we take that step ourselves.
About the Guest: Dr. Thomas Eßmeyer is a postdoc at the Digital Media Lab at the University of Bremen and has been researching dark patterns in social media since 2020. About the series “Digital Health Talks, the Live Podcast on the Health of the Future”: This is a series produced by the University of Bremen and the Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology – BIPS, funded by the BMFTR as part of the Year of Science 2026 – Medicine of the Future. Recorded on August 31, 2026, aboard the MS Wissenschaft in Offenbach. Additional dates in Bremen, Fulda, and Halle.