Engineered Emotions and the attention economy

This is old news — like 2012 old at least — but I feel renewed energy to share my perspective on this after seeing friends and family continue to fall for the same old tricks. Here's the truth: Social media is a trap. Or more precisely, social media operated by self-serving corporations is a trap. Social media is not intrinsically a trap; it just depends on how it's designed by each particular company, and self-serving corporations — those companies whose focus is to maximizes profits over everything else, including the well-being of their customers — are the worst of it. This includes Google (YouTube), Meta (Facebook/Instagram), X/Twitter, TikTok, among others.

I was reminded recently when some of my family members shared how they fall into the habit of scrolling for hours through social media. I also noticed it directly at family gatherings — times when I believe it would behoove us to be present with each other — where some people are hooked on their phones. It's like watching a struggling drug addict right in front of me, and I feel sad about that. 😢

And just now, I was reminded when Teresa shared a few videos with me that resonated with her — not because she shared the videos, but because when I swiped up to look at the next video it turned out to be the wrong gesture. Instead, I was presented with the next random video in my feed, to which I relinquished my attention for the briefest moment and immediately I felt the hook.

It was an instagram video of someone supposedly rescuing an owl: they caught it sitting on the road, provided veterinary care, food, a bath, and eventually released it back into the wild... but then it voluntarily came back to the owners and now is their loving companion. Momentarily, I felt a heartwarming connection. Quickly, however, my brain turned on and doubts crept in. Was this genuine? As far as I know, every part of that video was cobbled together from other videos of similar owls, crafted just to pull at one's heartstrings. In fact, it is extremely likely that's the case.

I feel frustrated that my attention was stolen for some useless fake video, and I feel frustrated that it affects my friends and family, that it's affecting people all around the world, and that it has been for years and we just keep going on like everything is totally fine.

Like I said, this is not new, but rather than it being a just a plausible theory lacking concrete evidence held by a few people, we now have decades of lived experience pointing to the harms of social media and a growing body of research literature which confirms it. Finally the broader public is waking up to the realization that social media has become a tool for emotional manipulation, rather than a tool for connection. In fact, the net result is more isolation rather than connection.

Getting to this point feels like it has been such a slow shift in public perception because this truth was evident to me basically from the onset, but I get it. Not everyone was using social media over a decade ago, and we're all busy with our own lives — each of us has to arrive at the realization in our own time.

For those just catching up now, here's the straight truth: most of the major companies offering social media today do not design their algorithms to prioritize relevant or helpful content; they design them to show you content that keeps you on the platform as long as possible so they can show you as many ads as possible, which is the basis for virtually all their revenue.

At the root of it, companies know they need content on their platform to keep people engaged. But it's impossible for them to create all the content themselves (that will change very soon with AI), so these companies have always relied on others to make content, regular people like you and me. So the companies all created some sort of incentive for people to make content for their platforms, whether it's paying people for videos that get a lot of views, or allowing people to build larger audiences and pull in sponsorships, etc.

So it's not Google or Facebook or X primarily making the content. It's regular people. But because the money people earn on these platforms is directly proportional to the size of their audience (more viewers = more ads served = more money for the company and the content creator), it's been a never-ending battle between content creators to capture the most attention.

Now, as it turns out, the content that captures the most attention and keeps people on the platform longest isn't necessarily truthful or even helpful content. It's theemotional content, polarizing content, and inflammatory content that keeps people hooked. At the same time, becoming a popular content creator — an influencer — has become idolized as an ideal path towards wealth and fame for many young people. So over the years millions of unscrupulous content creators have followed the same strategy of manufacturing reactions without a deeper awareness about its long-term consequences (or worse, they don't even care).

There have been calls for corporations to change their algorithms for the better, but these actions have been piecemeal and disorganized. For example, there have been efforts to ensure misinformation does not spread on these platforms to protect the integrity of our elections, which is good, but it's just one small part of the larger problem. Unfortunately, while ad revenue remains their primary source of income, companies will not change until they are forced to.

Today, we live in a world were self-serving social media companies perpetuate the harms by fine-tuning their algorithms to learn very quickly what keeps each individual hooked on the platform. They detect which content makes you pause, react, and share and gradually they filter your entire digital experience through this narrow lens of maximum emotional engagement. Your feed becomes a mirror reflecting not reality, but what most effectively hijacks your attention.

The consequences of this I believe should not be taken lightly:

• It erodes our capacity for critical thinking by training us to respond quickly rather than think deeply about what we see, to react instead of reflect, to feel instead of analyze.
• It keeps us in an echo chamber, limiting our exposure to diverse perspectives, entrenching our divisions when in truth we are far more alike when we are different.
• They shorten our attention spans — who wants to read long form content anymore? People have less patience for engaging in longer, more nuanced discussions.
• Ultimately, I fear that people will be increasingly unable to distinguish between fact and fiction, between what's meaningful and what's not.

We're not consumers of content and we haven't been for years. We're the product—our emotions have been commodified, our attention monetized, and I'm sick and tired of it wreaking havoc on friend, family, and society as a whole. 😢

Side note: I don't really use social media other than to post the occasional message to friends or share blog posts. I don't actually scroll through my feed and the only time I see content is right when I open facebook to share something. But this issue of social media companies commodifying our emotions for a profit is important enough to me that I am seriously considering not using facebook to post updates like this, because even though I don't browse, other people have to browse their feed in order to see my posts.... So I feel like I'm part of the problem.

At the same time, people aren't going to just leave facebook overnight because I wrote this post, and the only way I can continue to reach many of my friends and family is through this platform. It is this very reach that empowers me to share ideas and touch people's lives in a positive way.

So it's a conundrum, which I'll rest on for now. In the meantime, if you are reading this and you find value with what I share, I invite you to subscribe directly to my blog, my substack, or my bluesky (which is supposedly a more ethical twitter, designed so each user can control how their own feed operates). That way you can always be notified about what I share, rather than your exposure to it being at the whims of an algorithm that does not serve your interests. 👍