Why GCC Nations Must Move Beyond Content Moderation to Regulate Harm by Design

The recent verdicts in social media harms cases in New Mexico and California point to a finding that regulators can no longer ignore. Harms to children on social media platforms are not incidental. They are shaped by design choices. These cases also strengthen the case for treating platform design, rather than content alone, as a central regulatory concern.

Governments in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) already regulate social media platforms through technical controls, licensing requirements, and enforcement tools such as takedown requests and account restrictions. However, this regulatory framework has mainly focused on platform content rather than platform design.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has moved in this direction with Federal Decree-Law No. 26 of 2025 on Child Digital Safety, which introduces obligations around age verification, default privacy settings, child data protections, targeted advertising, and a risk-based classification framework for digital platforms.

Elsewhere in the GCC, approaches remain more fragmented. Qatar combines cybercrime legislation with regulatory guidance and awareness initiatives, while Kuwait relies on existing cybercrime laws and sector regulators to manage online harms. While these approaches have expanded enforcement tools, they remain largely focused on content rather than design.

The content-based approach in the GCC reflects both capability constraints and regulatory priorities. Historically, GCC regulators lacked the technical capacity and market leverage to compel platforms to open their algorithms or submit to independent audits. Content moderation, by contrast, could be pursued through telecommunications infrastructure and takedown mechanisms that regulators already control. It also served domestic governance objectives. Design-based accountability required tools, incentives, and bargaining power that were not yet available.

With improved technical expertise and economic weight, GCC nations are now better positioned to demand architectural accountability from platforms. The US verdicts further shift this balance. If platforms already hold evidence of design-related harms (through internal research and product testing), regulators need not rely solely on technical audits — disclosure requirements become a more practical enforcement lever. Therefore, the shift to design-based regulation is both more achievable and more urgent than before.

Design-based mandates focus on upstream harm prevention and treat platforms as products shaped by architecture and technical features. Three areas should be prioritized. First, algorithmic de-amplification —– limiting systems that prioritize high-engagement content and drive users, especially children, into increasingly narrow and potentially harmful content loops. Regulators should require platforms to disclose how their recommendation systems function, including the methods used to prioritize and amplify content. This transparency should be directed primarily to regulators through structured disclosures and risk assessments, similar to requirements under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and the UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA). Second, addressing addictive UX patterns, including features such as infinite scroll and autoplay that are intended to maximize time spent on platforms, making it harder for young users to disengage.

Regulators should require platforms to assess and mitigate risks arising from design features that promote excessive use, while allowing flexibility in how these measures are implemented. This could include measures such as usage prompts, limits on continuous engagement features, or restrictions on notifications for younger users. Third, default safety settings —– ensuring that privacy and safety protections are enabled by default for minors, including private accounts, restrictions on targeted advertising, and limits on location tracking. Regulators may also introduce complete bans on targeted advertising for young children, for example, for children under the age of 13.

These measures depend on effective age assurance, which raises its own privacy and data protection challenges. One way that some regulators have attempted to mitigate this is to extend certain design-based protections to all users, rather than applying them only to verified minors, as seen in approaches such as the UK’s Age Appropriate Design Code.

As with platform regulation anywhere, expanding oversight of platform design raises broader governance questions around transparency, proportionality, and the appropriate scope of regulatory access to platform data. As design-based regulation evolves, the challenge for regulators will be to balance child safety objectives with robust privacy protections, independent oversight mechanisms, and clear safeguards against the misuse of regulatory powers.

There are early signs of movement in the region. Elements of design-based regulation are emerging in proposed legislative amendments in Bahrain and in regulatory guidance in Saudi Arabia. However, these efforts remain limited. As the UAE has shown, addressing platform-related harms will likely require more comprehensive and enforceable legislative frameworks.

Outside the GCC, regulatory approaches are increasingly targeting platform design rather than content alone, including through duties of care and risk assessment obligations, as seen in frameworks such as the DSA, the OSA, and Australia’s evolving online safety regime. GCC regulators are not operating in isolation. The pace of alignment matters for this shift.

There is also scope for regional coordination. A shared GCC approach, whether through common legislative principles or regulatory cooperation, could support technical standardization, strengthen enforcement, and improve information sharing across jurisdictions. By leveraging joint initiatives such as the Digital Safety for the Gulf Child, the GCC can work as a unified market —– and use that collective weight to set binding expectations around design, data disclosure, and enforcement standards.

GCC nations are better placed than they may recognize to make the regulatory shift from platform content to platform design. Their institutions are strong, technical capabilities have grown, and telecom operators — with reach across multiple markets — offer enforcement infrastructure that few other regions can match. This is not a fundamental change of direction, but a natural extension of what GCC regulators already do well. As global standards around platform accountability consolidate, the cost of delay is no longer just harm to users. It is also the loss of any meaningful say in how those standards are shaped.