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When Digital Ill-being meets Social Injustice under the EU Digital Law

Seminar

Date: 15:30 | 20-10-2026

Location: E.09.14

European law has developed two powerful but largely separate grammars of vulnerability. Human-rights and equality law tend to understand vulnerability through histories of marginalisation, discrimination and structural disadvantage. Consumer law, by contrast, tends to understand vulnerability through diminished or contextually weakened market agency: age, infirmity, credulity, informational deficits, behavioural susceptibility and reduced capacity to resist manipulation. This article argues that the digital environment makes that separation increasingly untenable. Social disadvantage can increase dependency on digital infrastructures, exposure to manipulative design and susceptibility to digital ill-being; digital harms can in turn deepen pre-existing disadvantage. The article proposes 360-degree vulnerability as a bridging concept that analyses social location, relational dependency, market and technological architecture, and feedback effects together. It then shows how the EU Digital Rulebook (and especially the AI Act, Digital Services Act and emerging Digital Fairness Act) contain fragments of such an approach, and argues for a two-directional reform: consumer law should become more socially situated, while equality and fundamental-rights analysis should become more attentive to market and technological structures. The result is not a new category of inherently vulnerable people, but a method for identifying when social position, dependency, market power and digital design interact to produce systematically unequal risks of harm.

Interdiciplinary research hub on digitalization and society