When identity disappears, behavior changes.

The “veil of anonymity” allows people to fabricate age, identity, and intent. Dr. Michael Nuccitelli joins us to unpack how cyberstalking and online harassment are escalating — and the psychology behind the internet’s most predatory behavior.

🎧 Full episode — listen here: https://youtu.be/GZXRCh6xW8A

#Podcast #Cyberpsychology #OnlineSafety #Cyberstalking #IPredator #DigitalEthics #NewEpisode

When discussing the role of artificial intelligence in public discourse, I focus on the growing risk that advanced tools could be used to influence electoral processes. The speed and scale at which AI can generate persuasive content make it critical to consider safeguards that protect democratic systems. Understanding these vulnerabilities isn’t about fear — it’s about...
Read it here: https://solihullpublishing.com/blog/f/the-potential-for-ai-to-manipulate-elections
#AIandDemocracy #ElectionIntegrity #AIrisks #DigitalEthics

NEW EPISODE: Exploring the rise of cyberstalking and digital hostility.

Listen to the full episode. https://youtu.be/GZXRCh6xW8A

#Podcast #NewEpisode #Cyberpsychology #OnlineSafety #Cyberstalking #DigitalEthics

Just published: The volume "Trust and Disinformation", edited by Michael M. Resch et al., to which I contributed a chapter about fake news, conspiracy narratives and 'posttruth', and the inherent role of nihilism. #DigitalEthics

Zöllner, Oliver (2026): Fake News and Conspiracy Narratives in the Context of Regimes of "Posttruth": An Analysis from the Perspective of Nihilism. In: Michael M. Resch et al. (eds.): Trust and Disinformation. Cham: Springer, 87-101. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-96790-0_6.

The Hidden War in Your UI: Why Deceptive Design Patterns Are a Real Threat

1,944 words, 10 minutes read time.

As a developer, I am both annoyed and frankly shamed by the current state of software design. Every day, applications and platforms embed intentional annoyances into interfaces, forcing behavior, hijacking attention, and punishing users for expecting a seamless experience. You try to perform a simple task, and suddenly you’re redirected somewhere else entirely—maybe an ad, a subscription prompt, or a social feed—long before you even start the work you intended. These are not accidents. These are deliberate choices, coded into the system to manipulate, trap, and capitalize on human behavior. From forced search bars on mobile devices to pre-checked opt-ins on websites, these dark patterns exploit predictable cognitive biases, turning our attention into a commodity and our actions into revenue streams. This isn’t a small inconvenience—it’s a systematic exploitation of users’ time, focus, and trust, and it’s everywhere.

The consequences are not confined to frustrated individuals. Employers pay for it in lost productivity. Employees waste time correcting accidental interactions, navigating confusing prompts, or recovering from unintended actions. In sectors where precision and workflow efficiency matter, these misclicks scale into measurable losses, costing organizations millions collectively each year. Governments feel it too. Public services increasingly rely on digital portals—tax filing, healthcare registration, social services—but when these platforms employ dark patterns, citizens are misdirected, deadlines are missed, and error rates rise. Each forced interaction adds friction, increasing the cost of providing services and draining public resources. The economic burden is real, quantifiable, and currently ignored, while companies benefit from increased engagement, ad revenue, or subscriptions at the expense of productivity, efficiency, and trust. The government should step up and prohibit these manipulative practices, making companies accountable for intentionally deceiving their users. Until that happens, the cycle continues unabated.

How Dark Patterns Exploit Human Cognition

To understand why these patterns work, you need to recognize the psychology at play. Designers exploit attention, memory limitations, decision fatigue, and the human preference for the path of least resistance. Buttons placed where users are most likely to tap accidentally, pre-checked boxes designed to enroll you in services, and mislabelled toggles all manipulate these cognitive tendencies. The Fogg Behavior Model illustrates how even small prompts combined with minimal friction can trigger behaviors users never intended. Dark patterns exploit trust and expectation: they turn habitual attention and muscle memory into liabilities, guiding users down paths they would not consciously choose.

Real-world platforms offer clear examples. Social media apps like Facebook and Instagram frequently adjust UI elements—buttons, feed placement, navigation cues—in ways that subtly influence user engagement. Subscription services often obscure cancellation paths or hide essential controls, making the default, easier action the one the company wants. Even well-intentioned software, when poorly designed, can unintentionally trap users in workflows, but these dark patterns are far from accidental—they are engineered to maximize engagement and revenue at the user’s expense. When companies normalize these practices, users become desensitized to manipulation, eroding trust and making them more susceptible to both commercial and malicious exploitation.

Forced Interactions and Accidental Engagement: Costs to Employers and Governments

The human cost of dark patterns is only part of the story. Employers and governments bear substantial hidden costs. Employees navigating interfaces riddled with forced interactions spend countless minutes recovering from accidental clicks, dismissing misleading prompts, or correcting unintended selections. In high-stakes environments—healthcare, finance, or legal compliance—these misclicks can amplify into operational errors, delayed decisions, and lost productivity. Governments experience similar outcomes. Digital portals designed with confusing or manipulative flows increase errors, escalate support costs, and frustrate citizens trying to accomplish essential tasks. From pre-ticked marketing consent boxes to forced redirects in public service apps, these interfaces impose inefficiency and resource waste at scale.

The Pixel search bar example illustrates the mechanics personally, but the scope is far broader. E-commerce apps push pre-selected add-ons, subscription services hide opt-outs, and enterprise software overlays prompts directly in workflow paths. Each accidental click or forced interaction represents lost attention and increased cognitive load, which over time erodes trust and slows work. Beyond productivity, these misdirections can create vulnerabilities. Habitual engagement with deceptive interfaces can normalize disregard for warnings, cultivating conditions ripe for phishing, malware infection, or clickjacking attacks.

Dark Patterns as a Security Threat

The techniques behind dark patterns mirror the strategies hackers already exploit. Clickjacking, spoofed URLs, tabnabbing, and malicious pop-ups rely on the same behavioral leverage: users trusting what appears familiar and predictable. By conditioning people to click without thinking, dark patterns reduce the natural caution that guards against social engineering. While there are no public, verifiable cases of someone losing a job because they were redirected to a prohibited site via a dark pattern, the risk is clear: intentional annoyances in UI can inadvertently expose employees to restricted or inappropriate content, security incidents, or phishing attacks. Hackers are already using similar manipulations for financial gain; if commercial dark patterns normalize inattentive clicking, it’s only a matter of time before adversaries adapt these tactics systematically.

From a regulatory perspective, this elevates dark patterns from a nuisance to a societal concern. Employers must manage the risk of accidental exposure, governments must oversee secure and reliable digital services, and users are effectively subsidizing the cost of poor design and malicious exploitation. The potential fallout spans productivity loss, legal liability, and cyber risk—an intersection rarely acknowledged in discussions about user experience but increasingly critical as systems become more complex and interconnected.

Regulatory and Industry Responses to Deceptive UI

Governments and regulators are starting to take notice, but the pace is glacial compared to the ubiquity and sophistication of dark patterns. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has begun enforcing against manipulative interfaces, including cases where subscription services used deceptive defaults or buried cancellation options. A notable settlement with Amazon over hidden enrollment practices in its Prime service illustrates that regulators recognize dark patterns can create systemic harm, not just isolated user frustration. Similarly, privacy legislation such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) specifically prohibit coercive or deceptive manipulations of user consent, acknowledging that forced opt-ins, pre-checked boxes, and hidden controls undermine both privacy rights and user autonomy. These legal frameworks provide a foundation for holding companies accountable, but enforcement remains sporadic and limited in scope.

Industry-driven initiatives are also emerging, though they often lack teeth. UX and design organizations have published guidelines for ethical design and user-first principles, emphasizing transparency, control, and respect for cognition. Websites like DarkPatterns.org catalog manipulative designs and educate consumers, while professional associations provide heuristics for evaluating UX for ethical compliance. These frameworks offer companies a roadmap to avoid regulatory scrutiny and rebuild trust, but adoption is inconsistent. Many organizations continue to prioritize engagement metrics, ad revenue, and subscription conversions over ethical design, creating an environment where dark patterns thrive.

The interplay between regulation, corporate incentives, and ethical design is critical because dark patterns are not benign. Their impacts cascade through the workplace, government service delivery, and cybersecurity. Employees conditioned to accept manipulative flows may inadvertently compromise security. Citizens navigating government portals may experience inefficiency, confusion, and delays. Consumers are nudged into unintended purchases or data sharing. The cumulative effect is societal: wasted resources, eroded trust, and increased risk exposure. Without proactive regulation and industry commitment, these consequences will only intensify, and the incentive to adopt manipulative design will remain.

Designing Ethical UI: Balancing Business Goals with User Respect

Ethical design isn’t about removing friction entirely—it’s about aligning user behavior with informed choice rather than deception. Companies can achieve engagement and conversion without resorting to manipulative tactics by making paths transparent, defaults neutral, and consent explicit. This includes placing critical actions where users intend to find them, avoiding pre-selected options, labeling interfaces clearly, and respecting user attention rather than exploiting it. Transparency is a defensive and offensive strategy: it reduces the risk of accidental engagement with inappropriate content, lowers exposure to security incidents, and enhances brand trust. Organizations that internalize these principles see the long-term benefit of loyal, confident users who understand and respect the product rather than feeling tricked into using it.

Frameworks for ethical evaluation exist. Heuristic evaluations, cognitive walkthroughs, and user testing are tools to identify manipulative patterns before they reach production. These methods don’t just improve usability; they reduce legal and security risks by uncovering deceptive or friction-heavy elements that could be exploited accidentally or maliciously. Designing with ethical intent is no longer optional. The intersection of user experience, cybersecurity, and regulatory compliance demands that companies reconsider every prompt, redirect, and forced interaction through the lens of respect, transparency, and safety.

Conclusion: Recognizing the Battle and Reclaiming Control

Deceptive design patterns aren’t just a minor nuisance—they’re a battlefield embedded in every click, swipe, and prompt we encounter. From mobile apps to enterprise software and government portals, users are systematically manipulated, distracted, and exploited, and the costs are real: lost productivity for employers, inefficiency and frustration in public services, increased cybersecurity risk, and erosion of trust across the digital ecosystem. While there are no documented cases of someone losing a job directly because a dark pattern redirected them to inappropriate content, the potential is undeniable. Habitual exposure to forced interactions, hidden defaults, and misleading interfaces creates vulnerabilities that hackers and malicious actors can exploit, turning convenience into liability. It’s a matter of when, not if, these techniques are weaponized beyond commercial manipulation.

Governments and regulators need to step up decisively. Current legislation like GDPR, CCPA, and FTC enforcement actions provide a foundation, but they don’t address the sheer scale or subtlety of manipulative UI practices. Companies that continue to prioritize engagement metrics and revenue over user autonomy are externalizing costs onto society, employees, and security infrastructure. Until these behaviors are prohibited, users will remain the collateral damage in a battle they didn’t consent to.

As developers, designers, and informed users, we can reclaim control by demanding transparency, insisting on ethical design, and refusing to normalize manipulative interfaces. Companies can achieve engagement and profitability without resorting to deception, but only if they respect cognition, trust, and attention. The longer we tolerate dark patterns, the greater the risk of unexpected fallout: financial exploitation, accidental security breaches, and the erosion of professional and personal boundaries. The fight for ethical UI isn’t just about convenience or aesthetics—it’s about protecting attention, autonomy, and the integrity of every system we rely on. It’s time to call BS, demand accountability, and push the industry toward design that respects users instead of manipulating them.

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Sources

Dark Patterns: Deceptive UI Patterns – Nielsen Norman Group
Dark Patterns – DarkPatterns.org
The Ethics of UX Design – ACM Digital Library
FTC Actions Against Dark Patterns
GDPR on Automated Decision-Making
Behavioral Economics and UX Manipulation – JSTOR
Psychology of Dark Patterns – UX Collective
Impact of Deceptive Design on User Trust – ScienceDirect
Dark Patterns and Privacy – Privacy International
Dark Patterns in Mobile Apps – Taylor & Francis Online
Google’s UI Choices – Wired
Ethical Considerations in UI Design – ACM
UI Design Ethics and User Manipulation – ScienceDirect
Dark Patterns and Ethical UX – UX Matters

Disclaimer:

The views and opinions expressed in this post are solely those of the author. The information provided is based on personal research, experience, and understanding of the subject matter at the time of writing. Readers should consult relevant experts or authorities for specific guidance related to their unique situations.

AI personalization or exploitation? Fintech's use of psychiatric profiling raises ethical concerns. Time to rethink our approach to AI in decision-making. #EthicsInTech #AILeadership #FairAI #DigitalEthics #ChangeIsComing

https://leadershipinchange.com/p/ai-ethics-in-fintech

Hello, Fediverse 👋

I'm Sophie. I run a digital ops consultancy from the south of France, working with purpose-led businesses.

I'm in the process of leaving Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn. I got tired of building on platforms that sell our data, gut safety systems to please politicians, and treat people as products.

Still figuring it all out. Would love to connect.

#Introduction #EthicalSocialMedia #SmallBusiness #DeleteMeta #Fediverse #DigitalEthics

Fascinating and generous piece from @tante.cc@bsky.brid.gy on the ethical dilemmas inherent in technologies, particularly focused on GenAI/LLMs and ‘strawman’ arguments against not using them. #transitionism #DigitalEthics

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:aeug3w4mdhnc2wv73hmrh36v/post/3mfdqaraqhs2m

New Episode

AI may never be fully reliable.
That makes governance and design more important than ever.

Dr. Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi explores what a human–AI partnership could look like.

Listen here: https://youtu.be/bPLfEpJxbrs

#AI #DigitalEthics #TechPolicy

The Built-In Limits of AI

AI systems hallucinate. Not always because they’re broken — but because generative prediction isn’t the same as truth.

If reliability isn’t fully solvable, governance and design become critical.

This week, Dr. Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi examines whether society can build a symbiotic human–AI relationship rather than a competitive one.

🎙 Full episode: https://youtu.be/bPLfEpJxbrs

#AI #DigitalEthics #TechGovernance #FutureOfWork

Fransız diplomat Fabrice Aidan, Epstein belgelerinde adı geçen bir akademisyen olarak, uygunsuz içerikli siteleri izlediği iddialarıyla Türkiye’de adli soruşturma başlatıldı. Bu durum, dijital etik ve diplomatik sorumlulukları bir arada ele alarak uluslararası ilişkiler bağlamında önemli bir tartışma açıyor.

🚩 #Diplomacy #DigitalEthics #LegalIssue #InternationalRelations

X publishing its algorithm is the modern equivalent of the Catholic Church publishing its Bible.

“This is the doctrine.
Speak this way.
Structure your thoughts like this.
Follow these rules if you want to be seen.”

Visibility becomes salvation.
Suppression becomes excommunication.

Platforms are the dominant religion of our time.

#AlgorithmicPower #PlatformAuthority #DigitalEthics #InfrastructuralReligion

What strikes me is how cognitive warfare is becoming something more than “just propaganda”.

This feels different. More personal. More precise.

Not only about misleading us, but about wearing us down — cultivating ignorance, fatigue, and passivity in the face of rights, injustice, and responsibility.

This report helped me put words to that shift.

#cognitivewarfare #weaponizingAI #digitalethics #ethics #digitalrights #democracy

https://www.kas.de/en/web/canada/event-reports/detail/-/content/new-publication-wired-for-war-how-authoritarian-states-are-weaponizing-ai-against-the-west-with-migs-1

Isn't it odd that we live in a time where so much of the comedy and tragedy we consume is manufactured? Lying is too easy now.
- old man
#thoughts #DigitalEthics #SyntheticTruth #DigitalPhilosophy

AI-powered cheating just forced a new SAT rule.

#AI #Education #DigitalEthics #SAT

AI-generated extremism is exacerbating content proliferation and polarisation, outpacing detection and moderation efforts. Structural reform and responsible regulation are vital to prevent the erosion of democratic discourse.
Discover more at https://smarterarticles.co.uk/free-hate-at-scale-ai-extremism-and-the-attention-crisis?pk_campaign=rss-feed
#HumanInTheLoop #AIinSecurity #ContentModeration #DigitalEthics

Social Media Laws India 'लाइक और व्यूज' की भूख या जानलेवा सनक? वायरल होने के चक्कर में न भूलें कानून की मर्यादा, जेल भी हो सकती है! #SocialMediaLawsIndia #ViralVideoSafety #LegalAwareness #ContentCreatorLife #ITActIndia #CyberLaw #SafetyFirst #ReelsIndia #DigitalEthics #InternetSafety #ResponsibleSocialMedia #ViralVideos #ContentCreator #SafetyFirst #InternetRules #LegalAdvice #SocialMediaAwareness #DigitalSafety #LegalTips #SocialMediaLaws #ResponsibleContent

https://vrnewslive.com/social-media-laws-india-legal-awareness-cyber-law/

AI altered and fabricated images related to Minneapolis shootings abound online on social media. Durbin reportedly used one unknowingly.

#ai #LLMs #Slop #aimisinformation #ThinkBeforeYouShare #DigitalEthics #aiandmedia

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/ai-altered-photos-videos-minneapolis-shootings-blur-reality-rcna256552

A livestream moment where honesty met public shaming, revealing how platform mechanics can turn human dignity into a monetized metric.

https://kalvin.my/the-price-of-a-donut/

#technology #livestream #digitalethics #mentalhealth #onlineculture #creatoreconomy #activism #humanity #ethics #socialmedia #respect #power #internet #truth

AI personalisation is reshaping travel, offering tailored experiences but raising critical privacy, autonomy, and serendipity concerns. Finding a balance between innovation and ethical safeguards is essential.
Discover more at https://dev.to/rawveg/ai-travel-convenience-2nke
#HumanInTheLoop #AIinTravel #DigitalEthics #Privacy