Addictive Speech: How Social Media's Engineered Engagement Threatens Thinker-Based Speech Autonomy

By Mitchell Golden
In Print
September 28, 2026

Social media platforms claim to champion free speech, yet their relentless pursuit of maximal engagement undermines the very autonomy that free speech principles are designed to protect. This Comment argues that platforms’ engagement-seeking algorithms and addictive design features create conditions for what it terms “addictive speech”: a phenomenon in which users are manipulated into making speech acts (likes, comments, and shares) under conditions that diminish their capacity for rational deliberation. Drawing on Seana Shiffrin’s thinker-based justification for freedom of speech, this Comment demonstrates how platforms’ manipulative and addictive architectures interfere with the deliberative processes that precede user speech and proposes design-level remedies to better align platform behavior with the free speech values platforms claim to uphold.

About the Author

J.D., UCLA School of Law, 2026. Thank you to all my teachers and professors, who have pushed me to sharpen my thinking, my writing, and my self. I owe particular thanks to Neil Netanel for his thoughtful comments on an earlier draft , and to Seana Shiffrin for the pivotal conversation that helped this Comment take shape. Thank you to my family, for whom my appreciation—and love—could never be summed up in writing. And thank you to the brilliant editors at the UCLA Law Review, without whom this Comment would have stayed buried in the 2L folder of my hard drive. All mistakes are absolutely my own.

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