“Vibe Hacking”
Emotional manipulation as a new kind of digital harm
Open your phone in a low mood and most platforms already know it. Not in a human way, but in a statistical way: they have seen millions of people like you, at this time of day, in this emotional register. They can predict what will keep you scrolling, clicking, or coming back.
Technologists have started calling this kind of targeted mood-shaping “vibe hacking”: the tuning of tone, timing, content, and persona in digital environments in order to steer how we feel – and therefore what we do. In cybersecurity circles, “vibe hacking” already refers to AI-assisted social engineering that weaponises emotional cues to build trust and extract information.
The same basic logic is quickly spreading into mainstream platforms, recommender systems, and emotionally aware AI tools. That raises a bigger question at the heart of digital ethics: what happens to autonomy when our affective lives become just another optimisation problem?
What do we mean by “vibe hacking”?
Vibe hacking is the use of emotionally tuned digital interactions – wording, imagery, notification timing, “personality” of bots, background music, colour and design choices – to nudge users towards particular states of mind: calmer or more agitated, hopeful or fearful, energised or exhausted.
Three background trends make this qualitatively different from old-fashioned advertising:
Emotion AI (affective computing).
Systems that claim to infer emotional states from facial expressions, voice, text, body posture and other signals are moving from the lab into customer service, marketing, education and workplace monitoring.Always-on experimentation.
Platforms run continuous A/B tests on tiny changes in wording or feed ranking, learning which combinations produce more engagement.Closed-loop feedback.
The system does not just show you something and stop. It constantly updates its model of you, based on how you react, in order to refine the next emotional nudge.
This isn’t theoretical. In 2014, Facebook’s now-infamous “emotional contagion” study showed that by slightly altering the emotional tone of users’ feeds, researchers could measurably shift subsequent posts in a more positive or negative direction. The experiment rightly drew criticism for lack of consent, but it also demonstrated something crucial: small tweaks to the affective environment of a platform can scale into population-level mood shifts.
Vibe hacking, in this sense, is not a one-off trick. It is a background condition of life inside optimised digital systems.
From dark patterns to emotional manipulation
Regulators have begun to take “dark patterns” seriously: interface designs that steer users into choices they did not really intend to make. Scholars define dark patterns as design techniques that “coerce, manipulate or deceive users into making unintended and potentially harmful decisions.
Most enforcement so far focuses on cognitive manipulation: confusing wording, pre-ticked boxes, misleading defaults. Emotional manipulation is one step deeper. It aims to shape the feelings in which decisions are made:
a subscription app that detects frustration and offers a limited-time discount at the peak of irritation;
a companion chatbot that intensifies emotional intimacy when a user expresses loneliness;
a social feed that surfaces outrage-inducing content when the user is tired, knowing outrage keeps them engaged.
At that point, autonomy is not merely “nudged”. It is gradually hollowed out. If our moods are being tuned in order to maximise engagement or spending, the space for reflective, self-directed choice narrows.
Human rights: mental integrity and the “digital mind”
European human rights law already offers a language for this. Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights protects private life, which the Strasbourg court has interpreted to include physical and psychological integrity, closely linked to dignity and personal autonomy.
Recent scholarship goes further, arguing that existing human rights norms can and should be read to protect the mental realm: inner thoughts, emotional life, personality, and continuity of self. These debates have often focused on neurotechnology, but the same concerns arise when AI systems infer and manipulate emotions at scale without meaningful consent.
If we accept that psychological integrity and mental privacy are human rights interests, then large-scale emotional manipulation by opaque systems is not just an uncomfortable business practice. It is a potential rights violation.
What the EU AI Act does and doesn’t cover
The EU Artificial Intelligence Act, finally adopted in 2024–25, makes an important first move. Article 5 prohibits AI systems that:
use subliminal or purposefully manipulative techniques that materially distort behaviour in ways likely to cause significant harm, or
exploit vulnerabilities of specific groups (such as children or people with disabilities) to materially distort their behaviour and cause likely harm.
The Act also bans certain emotion-inference systems in workplaces and schools (with narrow exceptions), and restricts AI that builds facial recognition databases from scraped images.
This matters for vibe hacking:
It explicitly recognises manipulative emotional techniques as a category of risk and, in some cases, as outright prohibited.
It identifies vulnerability-based exploitation (for example, systems that target children’s emotional states) as unacceptable where likely to cause significant harm.
But the bar is high. Many forms of emotional tuning will not meet the threshold of “material distortion” or “significant” harm: they will simply make users a little more hooked, a little more anxious, a little more suggestible. Commentators have already warned of a “manipulation gap”, where cumulative, low-intensity harms fall between the cracks of the Act’s prohibitions and its high-risk categories. From a digital ethics perspective, this is precisely where autonomy is most at risk.
Children and young people at the sharp end
Children and adolescents are particularly exposed to vibe hacking:
Emotion-aware AI is being piloted in classrooms, mental health apps and “wellbeing” tools.
Mainstream platforms already provide much of the social and emotional background to teenage life, with recommender systems tuned to engagement rather than wellbeing.
Survey research on emotion AI and students shows a mix of fascination and deep unease: young people recognise the potential for support, but also worry about surveillance, misinterpretation and manipulation.
At the same time, Council of Europe and Strasbourg case law on domestic abuse has strengthened the idea that sustained emotional and psychological control can constitute serious rights violations, prompting positive obligations on states to criminalise coercive control and protect victims.
The ethical question practically asks itself: if we are prepared to recognise coercive emotional control in intimate relationships as a serious wrong, why are we so slow to recognise structurally similar dynamics when they are deliberate, automated, scaled, and monetised?
Naming vibe hacking as a digital harm
From a Centre for Digital Ethics perspective, treating vibe hacking as a serious digital harm would involve a few steps:
Conceptual clarity - We need to distinguish between:
Inference of emotional state;
Targeting based on that state; and
Optimisation loops that adapt in real time to our affective responses.
Each layer raises distinct ethical and legal questions.
Regulatory integration - Emotional manipulation should be addressed explicitly in:
AI Act implementation and enforcement (especially Article 5 and high-risk obligations);
Digital Services Act risk assessments around systemic risks to mental health and civic discourse;
Data protection impact assessments where emotional data or inferences are processed.
Human-rights framing - Mental integrity, psychological autonomy and continuity of personality need to be recognised as concrete, justiciable interests in digital policy not abstract rhetoric. Work on “neurorights” and psychological continuity provides a useful starting point.
Autonomy literacy - Education programmes especially for teenagers, parents, educators and designers should explain how emotional signals are harvested and used, and help people notice when their “vibes” are being subtly tuned for engagement rather than wellbeing.
Where the Centre for Digital Ethics fits in
At the Centre for Digital Ethics, we see emotional manipulation as one of the emerging frontiers of digital harm. It sits at the intersection of:
technology design and optimisation,
psychological vulnerability,
legal concepts of autonomy and mental integrity.
Our work on autonomy literacy argues that people need tools not only to recognise misinformation or protect data, but to understand how platforms and AI systems shape the conditions under which they feel, choose and relate.
In the coming months, we will be:
mapping how emotional inference and targeting are already deployed across consumer apps, AI companions and platforms;
examining how EU and Council of Europe frameworks (AI Act, DSA, GDPR, ECHR) can be used to address emotional manipulation; and
developing practical guidance for regulators, educators and designers on reducing vibe hacking and supporting genuine autonomy.
If we are serious about dignity in the digital age, we need to draw a clear line: our minds, moods and emotional lives are not just another surface for optimisation.
