The Dark Side of Copywriting: What are "Dark Patterns"?

That subscription that auto-renewed without you noticing. That newsletter you don’t remember signing up for. That discount that mysteriously disappeared the moment you put the item in your basket.

These aren’t accidents of bad design — they’re a category of interface and copy choices with a name, and increasingly a regulator attached to them.

Dark patterns are online design practices that subtly mislead or manipulate users into taking an action they didn’t intend to.

What’s changed

A few years ago this was mostly a reputational risk — the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority has banned adverts from major brands including Nike and Sky for using dark-pattern tactics in their online “choice architecture” (The Guardian). It’s now also a direct legal one, at least for larger platforms. Article 25 of the EU’s Digital Services Act prohibits online platforms from designing or organising their interfaces in a way that deceives or manipulates users, or materially distorts their ability to make a free, informed decision — and in December 2025 the European Commission issued its first formal non-compliance decision under the DSA, fining X (formerly Twitter) €120 million for several breaches, including the use of dark patterns around its blue-check verification badge.

A wider law is also on the way, though it isn’t here yet. The European Commission ran a public consultation on a proposed Digital Fairness Act through to October 2025, aimed squarely at manipulative interface design, addictive patterns and misleading influencer marketing, with a legislative proposal expected sometime in 2026. It hasn’t been tabled as we publish this, so treat anything you read about its final scope as a forecast, not a rulebook — but the direction of travel is unambiguous: broader rules, more enforcement, less patience for “it’s just persuasive copy” as a defence.

What actually counts as a dark pattern

The common ones, in roughly the order copywriters and designers tend to reach for them:

• Confirmshaming: a decline button worded to make the user feel foolish or mean for clicking it (“No thanks, I don’t want to save money”).
• Hidden costs: a price that grows at checkout without warning, or a discount that vanishes once you’re committed.
• Forced continuity: a free trial that’s trivial to start and deliberately awkward to cancel.
• False urgency: a countdown timer or “only 2 left” that resets, or was never true in the first place.
• Pre-ticked boxes: consent for marketing, upsells or data sharing switched on by default, so opting out takes more effort than opting in.

Building brighter patterns

The good news, if you’re designing or writing for a website, is that avoiding dark patterns doesn’t cost you conversion the way marketing folklore suggests. Three principles do most of the work:

1. Be transparent by default. If a user would be surprised by a cost, a renewal or a consequence, say it before they commit — not in the small print after.
2. Don’t trade on negative emotion. Guilt, confusion and manufactured urgency might lift a click-through rate for a week; they cost you the customer’s trust for good, and now they can cost you a regulatory fine too.
3. Make the easy path and the honest path the same path. If declining, cancelling or opting out requires more clicks than accepting, that asymmetry is the dark pattern — fix the flow, not just the wording.

Why this is worth getting right now

The commercial argument for avoiding dark patterns used to rest mostly on brand trust — real, but slow-moving and hard to put a number on. That’s changed. A DSA finding now carries a fine calculated as a percentage of global turnover, which is a very different kind of conversation with a board than “some customers might feel misled”. For any business operating in the EU, or selling to EU customers from outside it, dark-pattern review of checkout flows, cancellation journeys and consent screens has moved from a nice-to-have design review into something closer to a compliance check — worth doing before a regulator does it for you.

The copywriter’s part in this

Design gets most of the blame, but plenty of dark patterns live entirely in the words — a confirmshame button, an ambiguous “no thanks”, a countdown copy that implies scarcity nobody can verify. That makes this partly our problem to solve, not just a designer’s. Here at Bwritr, we regularly work on web copy projects, from microcopy to full site rewrites, and we steer clear of dark patterns as a matter of course — not because a regulator might notice, but because copy that has to trick someone into clicking isn’t doing its job.

We love writing clear, concise, honest copy that earns a click rather than engineering one. Contact us to find out more about our writing and editing services.