Digital Literacy: Teaching Students How Platforms Are Designed

You build a short unit — three or four lessons for a real class — around a list written by the regulator rather than by us. In July 2025 the European Commission named, feature by feature, what an online platform should switch off for a minor. Your students learn to find those features, name them, and turn them off.

• Monday — you audit what your students can already do, competence by competence. That gap list is the specification for everything you build.
• Tuesday — you open a minor’s account on your own device and see what it discloses before anyone touches a setting.
• Wednesday — the persuasive features: infinite scroll, autoplay, streaks, notifications timed to pull attention back.
• Thursday — the feed and the AI inside it: what the platform was told, what it inferred, and what it must warn a child about.
• Friday — you teach a segment of your unit to the room, then rewrite it on the strength of what happened.

Nothing here is a talk about screen time. Every feature examined during the week is one a student can go and find in an app they already have open, and every lesson you build is tied to a numbered competence with its own evidence that a student can do it.

A phone confiscated mid-lesson solves the disruption in front of you. It teaches the student nothing about why the app in their hand was built to be difficult to put down. Most internet-safety guidance stops where the confiscation stops: rules about behaviour, nothing about design.

This week is organised around a document that does the opposite. On 14 July 2025 the European Commission published its guidelines on the protection of minors online under Article 28(1) of the Digital Services Act. They are unusually specific, and their own structure gives the week its shape: what an account discloses by default, how an interface is designed, how a feed is assembled, and what a platform owes a user who reports something.

Say plainly what they are. The guidelines are not binding law. The Commission states that it will use them as a benchmark when it judges whether a platform meets its obligations, and that following them does not by itself make a platform compliant; only the Court of Justice of the European Union can interpret Article 28(1) authoritatively. That distinction matters the first time a parent asks you whether an app is “illegal”.

Tuesday works through the default settings the guidelines say a minor’s account should arrive with — autoplay and live streaming off, push notifications off and always off during core sleep hours, and the counters that drive repeat visits turned off: likes and reactions, streaks, the “… is typing” indicator, read receipts. Participants check their own devices against that list. Most accounts fail it, and that failure is the lesson.

Wednesday takes the persuasive design features the guidelines name separately: the possibility to scroll indefinitely, the superfluous action required to refresh a feed, automatically triggered video, notifications artificially timed to regain attention, notifications that pretend to come from another user, signs communicating scarcity or urgency, and virtual rewards for repeated actions. Each one is a mechanic a student can find, name and switch off — which is a different lesson from being told to use the phone less.

Thursday is the feed, and the AI in it. Recommender systems decide what is prioritised and displayed, and the guidelines treat them as a risk to be tested rather than a neutral convenience. The same section covers AI features directly: chatbots and filters should not be switched on automatically, should be easy to turn off, and a child should be warned that talking to one is not like talking to a person and that what it says can be wrong. A class can check all three claims in an afternoon.

Every lesson built during the week is tied by name and number to a DigComp competence. “Internet safety” is a topic, and topics are hard to teach and impossible to assess. But 4.2 Protecting personal data and privacy and 4.3 Supporting wellbeing are two different jobs, with different evidence that a student can do them. The list comes from DigComp 3.0, the European Union’s own digital competence framework, published by the Commission’s Joint Research Centre in November 2025.

There is also machinery behind you that most teachers never hear about. Every member state runs a Safer Internet Centre through the Insafe network, and the guidelines themselves devote a section to reporting and user support. You locate your own country’s centre during the week and write down where your job ends and theirs begins.