Pay Attention: a Call to Regulate the Attention Market and Prevent Algorithmic Emotional Governance

2024-02-26

AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society

AI Summary

This paper addresses the systemic crisis of the global attention economy: social media platforms exploit cognitive biases and affective manipulation to extract user attention, thereby exacerbating ideological polarization, disinformation proliferation, and threats to public health, economic stability, and democratic integrity. Methodologically, it pioneers the concept of “algorithmic affective governance,” integrating insights from psychology, neuroscience, sociology, and platform studies through a critical technical practice and policy impact analysis framework to deconstruct the operational logic of attention markets. Its primary contribution is a public-welfare-oriented, interdisciplinary regulatory framework that advances actionable policy recommendations—urging scholars and policymakers worldwide to reconceptualize attention as a digital-era public good. By bridging ethical rigor with institutional feasibility, the framework proposes a novel paradigm for global digital governance. (149 words)

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Bias, Fairness & Equity
• Natural Language Processing: Ethics — Bias, Fairness, Transparency & Privacy

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Media and governance, opinion dynamics, filter bubbles, polarization
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Economics and fairness of platforms and recommendation systems
• Responsible Web: Algorithmic accountability and transparency on the web

Abstract

Over the last 70 years, we, humans, have created an economic market where attention is being captured and turned into money thanks to advertising. During the last two decades, leveraging research in psychology, sociology, neuroscience and other domains, Web platforms have brought the process of capturing attention to an unprecedented scale. With the initial commonplace goal of making targeted advertising more effective, the generalization of attention-capturing techniques and their use of cognitive biases and emotions have multiple detrimental side effects such as polarizing opinions, spreading false information and threatening public health, economies and democracies. This is clearly a case where the Web is not used for the common good and where, in fact, all its users become a vulnerable population. This paper brings together contributions from a wide range of disciplines to analyze current practices and consequences thereof. Through a set of propositions and principles that could be used do drive further works, it calls for actions against these practices competing to capture our attention on the Web, as it would be unsustainable for a civilization to allow attention to be wasted with impunity on a world-wide scale.

Problem

• Regulate attention market to prevent harmful algorithmic governance
• Address cognitive biases in Web platforms causing societal damage
• Propose principles to combat unsustainable attention exploitation

Innovation

• Regulate attention market to prevent harm
• Analyze multidisciplinary practices and consequences
• Propose principles against attention-capturing techniques