Am I in Control? How the Design of the TikTok Feed Shapes Users’ Sense of Agency

Social media platforms increasingly rely on Attention-Capture Damaging Patterns (ACDPs) optimized to maximize user engagement, often at the expense of users' Sense of Agency (SoA) and perceived control. This paper preliminarily investigates how two core ACDPs in TikTok-namely infinite scroll and content autoplay-shape users' SoA at both reflective and experiential levels. By manipulating these patterns and replacing them with small design changes, we conducted a controlled laboratory study in which agency was assessed through self-report measures, interaction logs, and temporal estimation tasks as a proxy for experiential agency. Results indicate that replacing autoplay with explicit playback significantly increases perceived agency and reduces time distortion. In contrast, paginated scrolling produced more subtle quantitative effects, but emerged as the solution most favored by participants. Together, these findings suggest that small feed-level design changes can meaningfully support users' SoA, while also revealing a tension between intervention effectiveness and perceived intrusiveness.