“Coming out of the platform haze feels like regaining consciousness in a society where cocaine, meth and heroin have become so ordinary that even four-year-olds are taking them, and everyone carries on as though nothing is wrong. People may even fight to protect the arrangement, because they have mistaken their dependence for reality itself. That is how obscene this has become: technology continually interposing itself between human beings and the lives they are here to live. The companies responsible have had a few decades to establish their habits. We are living beings shaped by millions of years of evolution, capable of recognising harm, resisting it and changing our surroundings. Their grip can be broken. We can establish boundaries and require technology to serve the lives we choose. I want my daughter to inherit a world where this period is remembered with disbelief, where people look up and find one another again. I hope the day comes soon when we stop looking out at a population seemingly under the influence, and recognise a humanity that has reclaimed its senses. Soon.”
We should never have normalised an industry that treats the human mind as a site for continuous commercial intervention.
We should never have accepted the proposition that participation in ordinary life requires submission to systems whose profitability depends on keeping us available, measurable and dissatisfied enough to return.
The platforms secured an extraordinary concession: they persuaded societies to mistake a business arrangement for the natural environment. They occupied the pauses between activities, installed themselves inside friendships and acquired a supervisory role over culture. Having recovered room for my own thoughts, I find the original bargain increasingly obscene. Relief has sharpened into anger at the scale of what we permitted, and at the arrogance with which its beneficiaries still describe our resistance as an adjustment problem.
I want my daughter’s generation to grow up in a world where this period is remembered with embarrassment. I want her to learn that people once carried continuously updating commercial environments into their bedrooms, allowed strangers to sell them lifestyles through simulated friendship and consulted public counters to discover whether their existence had registered. I want the explanation to sound historically specific, belonging to an era that ended because people withdrew their consent and governments finally exercised judgement. She should inherit an expectation that her attention belongs to her. The possibility that she might instead be taught to manage lifelong exposure to machinery designed to defeat her preferences fills me with a contempt that no industry vocabulary about connection can soften.
Normalisation proceeded through small accommodations whose cumulative effect was enormous. A workplace announcement appeared exclusively on a platform. A local club relocated its notices there. A family photograph became an invitation to create an account. Artists were told that visibility required constant publication, and customers learned that asking a business a question might involve entering somebody else's advertising infrastructure. Each decision appeared convenient within its immediate setting. Together they created dependence, then supplied dependence as evidence of public enthusiasm. People who objected were offered settings, coping strategies and lectures about adapting to change. The companies acquired the benefit of an infrastructure's apparent necessity while retaining the privileges of private owners who could alter its conditions whenever commercial priorities demanded it.
The underlying surveillance has been documented in language considerably less sentimental than the companies' advertising. The United States Federal Trade Commission's 2024 investigation of nine major social media and video streaming businesses found extensive collection of information about users and non-users, inadequate retention controls and instances in which deletion requests did not remove all user data. Its staff also described limited opportunities to refuse the use of personal information in automated systems. The commercial incentive to collect information for targeted advertising repeatedly conflicted with privacy.[1] These findings establish a concrete basis for anger. A person entering a conversation or watching a video should not have to accept an expanding, poorly bounded relationship with an organisation's systems for classifying human behaviour.
Privacy concerns the freedom to live without continually furnishing an interested institution with material about oneself. The familiar defence that an individual has nothing to hide evades the institutional question: why should a company acquire this information in the first place? A private interval allows a person to revise an opinion, investigate an unfamiliar subject or experience an unflattering emotion without turning that activity into commercial intelligence. Observation changes the conditions of freedom even when nobody can demonstrate an immediate injury. We have tolerated the presumption that collection is reasonable until the observed person proves otherwise. That presumption should provoke disgust. Companies should have to justify what they take, explain why they need it and accept limits that remain binding when further extraction would be profitable.
The price of retreat exposes another ugly possibility: quiet can become a privilege sold back to those able to afford it. A person with money can pay for subscriptions, delegate administrative work and live near pleasant places to spend an afternoon. Someone with fewer resources may depend on advertising-funded services and a phone that performs almost every practical function. A settlement that offers privacy chiefly through payment would preserve the original hierarchy in a different form. People should receive enforceable protections wherever they enter a service. Their right to set limits should survive the absence of a premium subscription. Making basic autonomy a luxury purchase would compound the insult of having treated it as available for appropriation in the first place.
The interfaces through which consent is supposedly obtained make the insult more explicit. The European Data Protection Board's final 2023 guidelines describe deceptive designs that overload people with requests, obstruct their decisions, exploit emotional responses or conceal relevant information.[2] An interface can make agreement immediate while distributing refusal across a succession of screens. It can ask again after receiving an answer, or surround a privacy choice with language calculated to induce anxiety. Calling the resulting compliance consent confers moral dignity on a process built to exhaust resistance. A refusal should terminate the request. When a company treats refusal as a design obstacle to overcome, it reveals how little respect sits beneath the performance of customer empowerment.
The injury also concerns time, particularly the small intervals that previously escaped organised demands. A pause at a bus stop could contain an observation, a memory or nothing at all. Now it can be filled before the person has decided what the pause means. Continuous delivery gives every fleeting impulse an external continuation. Irritation acquires a topic; curiosity acquires a recommendation; loneliness acquires an audience that may disappear as quickly as it assembled. There is something appallingly presumptuous about treating these conditions as inefficiencies awaiting a product. A mind requires periods in which experience can settle. Nobody should have to defend an unoccupied moment against an institution determined to make that moment produce a measurable response.
The evidence for distraction does not require fantastic claims about permanent neurological ruin. In a 2015 experiment, Cary Stothart and colleagues found that phone notifications disrupted performance on an attention-demanding task even when participants did not interact with their phones.[3] The practical implication is sufficiently damning: an interruption can impose a cost before anyone has chosen to engage with its content. People are then expected to supply the discipline needed to absorb countless such invitations while continuing to work, read and attend to one another. The commercial actor receives the opportunity to interrupt; the person interrupted receives responsibility for managing the consequences. We should recognise the contempt embedded in that division of labour.
A 2025 randomised trial by Noah Castelo and colleagues tested a more substantial boundary. Participants were assigned to block internet access on their smartphones for two weeks while retaining calls, texts and internet access on other devices. The study reported improvements in wellbeing, mental health measures and objectively assessed sustained attention. Its limitations deserve precision: of 467 initial participants, only 119 met the preregistered compliance threshold, and attrition restricts confidence about generalisation.[4] The experiment neither diagnoses an entire civilisation nor establishes irreversible damage. It does, however, provide causal evidence that removing constant mobile access can improve measured outcomes. That possibility should unsettle anyone who has been instructed to regard permanent connection as an unquestionable achievement.
An earlier experiment by Hunt Allcott and colleagues, published in the American Economic Review in 2020, found that four weeks of Facebook deactivation increased average subjective wellbeing, increased some offline activities and produced a persistent reduction in subsequent Facebook use. Participants also lost some factual news knowledge, a cost the researchers reported plainly.[5] The finding matters because distance altered how people used and valued the service. A habit can sustain demand that weakens after the habit is interrupted. Usage figures therefore cannot settle whether a product deserves its position in daily life. An industry eager to cite participation as vindication should be less comfortable with evidence that departure can improve people's lives and reduce their wish to return.
Influencer culture deserves an especially severe judgement because its defining commercial ambition is so nakedly degrading. It takes influence, a consequence that might arise from knowledge, achievement or a worthwhile contribution, and promotes influence itself into an occupation and an aspiration. A person becomes a medium through which attention can be accumulated and transferred to purchasers. Their apparent accessibility supplies the emotional texture; commercial arrangements supply the incentive. The resulting culture teaches audiences to consider a carefully maintained presence an appropriate source of authority across subjects requiring entirely different kinds of competence. Being familiar becomes a credential. Being repeatedly visible becomes a reason to listen. An economic mechanism for distributing advertising acquires the social standing of a relationship.
The label creator can conceal this arrangement by placing a patient educator, a filmmaker and a personality selling access to an audience within the same flattering occupational category. Their work deserves evaluation according to what they actually make and how they conduct the transaction. An explanation that teaches somebody a skill has a purpose that can be assessed. A film can be encountered as a finished work. An endorsement should disclose its commercial terms. Collapsing these distinctions allows advertising to borrow the prestige of cultural production while genuine cultural production becomes increasingly dependent on advertising routines. We should recover the vocabulary and confidence to judge the work, including the confidence to call a concealed sales pitch dishonest however personable its delivery.
The machinery works particularly well when selling ceases to look like selling. A familiar face appears in a domestic setting, recounts a difficulty, offers an intimate detail and introduces a recommendation in the same conversational register. Viewers can encounter useful advice and sincere creative work within this arrangement. The ethical objection concerns the commercial incentive to blur distinctions they need to make. Friendship permits reciprocal obligations and knowledge of a particular person. A broadcast persona can evoke those expectations without assuming them. When that borrowed trust is sold to an advertiser, audiences deserve to know immediately. The deliberate cultivation of ambiguity should attract public contempt, especially when the ambiguity concerns money and the person receiving the recommendation has been encouraged to feel personally understood.
Australian enforcement work supplies evidence of how frequently disclosure has failed within scrutinised material. In December 2023, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission reported that 81 per cent of 118 influencers reviewed had made posts raising concerns about potentially misleading advertising. The sweep followed consumer tip-offs, so its results cannot be treated as a representative estimate of every influencer's conduct. The regulator identified failures to disclose commercial relationships and disclosure practices that were vague or difficult to notice.[6] The qualification leaves the underlying indictment intact. A business that trades on trust and then obscures who is paying for the recommendation has compromised the very quality it invites its audience to admire.
European authorities encountered a related pattern. A coordinated sweep of 576 influencers found commercial content on 97 per cent of the reviewed accounts, while only 20 per cent systematically identified it as advertising. These were enforcement findings concerning the accounts examined, rather than a random population survey.[7] The figures describe an industry whose celebrated informality has repeatedly concealed ordinary commercial obligations. Disclosure should be elementary. A customer should not require investigative skills to distinguish an independent recommendation from a paid promotion. The glamour surrounding the influencer conceals a tawdry transaction when personal warmth becomes the packaging for an undisclosed sale. Public admiration should be withdrawn from that conduct with considerably less hesitation than the industry has shown in exploiting it.
There is a wider indignity in turning authenticity into a production requirement. Once being oneself becomes a continuous commercial task, private experience supplies raw material for maintaining a saleable identity. An ordinary breakfast needs a visual treatment. A personal disappointment needs an audience strategy. Even apparent withdrawal can be announced, documented and incorporated into the performance. I resent the cultural pressure that makes this condition appear enviable. Human beings deserve experiences that do not have to establish their value before spectators. An afternoon can remain an afternoon. A child can accomplish something without furnishing a parent's public persona. The insistence that everything become communicable, legible and capable of generating attention is an impoverished account of living, however expensive its equipment.
Artists have suffered a particularly vicious version of this bargain. The promise of reaching people directly can become an obligation to remain perpetually visible in an environment whose conditions the artist cannot control. Someone trying to write a novel or develop a visual language is encouraged to interrupt the work repeatedly to advertise the fact that work is occurring. Silence becomes a professional anxiety. The quality of a piece can be confused with the performance of its announcement. This is a grotesque allocation of creative energy. Work often develops through uncertainty, repetition and long periods in which there is little worth presenting. A culture that penalises those conditions makes commercial responsiveness an unofficial requirement for being allowed to continue creating.
I have no interest in humiliating people who depend on these systems for income. Their dependence strengthens the case against the owners who benefit from it. A creator may comply because rent is due, an audience is concentrated in one place and alternatives demand labour they cannot presently afford. Celebrating such participation as entrepreneurial freedom conceals the power of the intermediary to organise access. The supposed proprietor of a personal brand can discover that visibility depends on decisions made elsewhere. We should be furious that so many talented people have been persuaded to regard this insecurity as liberation. A worthwhile public culture would make it easier to reach audiences through durable relationships that survive changes in a company's distribution priorities.
Anger itself has been drawn into the system, which makes writing an angry essay an exercise in responsibility. William Brady and colleagues' 2017 study of political discussion on Twitter found that moral-emotional language was associated with greater diffusion, especially within ideological networks.[8] The study concerns a particular dataset and establishes a pattern of circulation, rather than proving that every angry statement is manufactured. Its relevance is that public visibility can reward a style of expression independently of the quality of the underlying judgement. The incentive to express disgust becomes difficult to separate from the opportunity to acquire attention. A public sphere organised around that opportunity risks rewarding the appearance of conviction while neglecting the reasoning that ought to justify it.
Brady and colleagues extended this research in 2021 through observational studies and controlled experiments, finding that positive social feedback and network norms could encourage subsequent expressions of moral outrage. The researchers explicitly distinguished public expressions from the emotions people actually experienced.[9] That distinction should trouble anyone who reads a feed as an unmediated account of public feeling. An environment can teach people which performances receive reinforcement, then present the resulting performances as evidence of what everyone naturally thinks. My anger at this system needs an argument, an object and an endpoint. A feed's commercial interest can persist after all three have vanished. Indignation becomes another renewable input, detached from the possibility of resolving the conditions that originally justified it.
The effects extend to the circulation of information. Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy and Sinan Aral's 2018 study of verified true and false news stories distributed on Twitter found that falsehood travelled more widely and quickly within the material examined.[10] This finding does not describe every form of journalism or every network. It identifies a serious problem with treating circulation as a proxy for worth. Verification takes time, while novelty can command an immediate response. An environment that continually solicits reaction can allow an allegation to acquire social force before readers have examined its basis. Citizens are left to repair understanding under conditions that keep producing the next demand. The platform collects engagement while the public performs the expensive work of recovering a shared account of events.
Research on political effects also requires specificity. A large experiment during the 2020 United States election found that replacing Facebook and Instagram's algorithmic feeds with chronological ones changed users' experiences and reduced engagement without detecting corresponding changes in several political attitudes.[11] A different experiment on X, published in Nature in 2026, found that switching a chronological feed to an algorithmic one shifted some political views in a conservative direction; reversing the switch produced no comparable effect, and neither intervention significantly changed measured partisanship or affective polarisation.[12] These results resist universal slogans. They support demanding independent scrutiny of particular systems, circumstances and outcomes. No commercial company should be granted presumptive innocence about its political influence simply because influence is complicated to measure.
The democratic objection also concerns who possesses the authority to organise public attention. Owners can determine the conditions under which speech is encountered without assuming the duties of a public institution. A person may remain formally free to speak while becoming dependent on an opaque mechanism for reaching others. Changes to that mechanism can rearrange the practical conditions of participation. Public argument then occurs inside an environment whose commercial and editorial choices are difficult to inspect and whose governing priorities citizens do not collectively determine. A society should find that concentration of discretionary power intolerable. Expressive freedom needs institutions and routes of communication that people can understand, contest and leave without surrendering their place in public life.
Journalists and cultural institutions should examine their own accommodation to these incentives. Publishing an article can become a preliminary step before repackaging it for distribution under conditions a platform controls. A museum may announce an event through a stream in which its invitation must compete with outrage and sponsored intimacy. Public value then has to secure passage through a commercial mechanism that recognises engagement more readily than merit. Institutions should direct resources towards channels that preserve context and provide reliable access. Their audiences deserve a stable place to find the work and enough information to assess it. Continually borrowing attention from companies that govern its distribution leaves public institutions helping to maintain the very dependence they should make easier to escape.
Children make the failure of judgement harder to excuse. They enter a world whose adults have already organised around commercial systems, then receive instructions for protecting themselves within it. We should resist exaggerated claims about the evidence. The National Academies' 2024 consensus report did not find sufficient support for a population-level causal conclusion that social media changes adolescent health; it emphasised varied experiences, methodological difficulties, potential harms and real benefits.[13] A child finding companionship or support online has experienced something valuable. None of this grants companies permission to exploit developmental vulnerabilities or displaces their responsibility for particular design choices. Uncertainty about the size and distribution of harm creates a reason for better research and proportionate protection. It supplies no moral licence for commercial indifference.
My daughter should have the opportunity to develop a self before confronting an industry eager to classify and influence it. Childhood includes temporary enthusiasms, awkward experiments and beliefs that may vanish within a week. Those provisional states deserve privacy. I want her to encounter books she chooses slowly, friendships that acquire depth through shared experience and boredom that leaves room for invention. I want her to make something badly and continue because she enjoys making it. The presence of an imagined audience can enter an activity astonishingly early once public approval becomes its measure. Adults have a responsibility to preserve conditions in which a child's interests can unfold without being continually recruited into somebody else's account of what deserves attention.
Parents also deserve an end to the insulting proposition that vigilance at home can compensate for an environment organised against it. A household may impose limits while schools, clubs, friends and commercial services keep making platform participation convenient or expected. Every boundary then becomes a private negotiation conducted against collective pressure. The parent is asked to supply endless patience, technical knowledge and consistency; the company is permitted to continue developing systems that increase use. Responsibility has been distributed to the people with the least control over the design. A serious response would change what institutions demand and what products are allowed to do, so that protecting a child becomes an ordinary social expectation with practical support.
The same principle applies to adults. An employer should not assume that carrying a connected device makes a worker indefinitely available. A community organisation should maintain a usable website and a direct means of contact. A public service should provide essential information without requiring an account in a commercial social network. These are modest obligations with substantial consequences: each removes a practical penalty for declining participation. Freedom to leave remains thin when departure creates avoidable barriers to work, local information or social coordination. We have spent too long praising individual boundary-setting while allowing institutions to undermine the boundaries people set. Those institutions should now accept responsibility and help dismantle the dependence they helped create.
The high speed web deserves scrutiny because it made continuous delivery so effortless that interruption could become ambient. Speed is a technical capacity, and the studies discussed here do not establish that bandwidth itself damages the brain. My objection concerns the social settlement built around permanent, portable access. We treated the ability to deliver more material immediately as sufficient justification for doing so everywhere. That judgement surrendered the rhythm of daily life to whichever service could supply the next stimulus. Waiting, finishing and being temporarily unavailable became conditions to eliminate. I reject the assumption that every improvement in delivery capacity deserves an equivalent expansion in the amount of human experience exposed to commercial delivery.
I would welcome a future in which portable high speed access was permitted chiefly for defined purposes such as maps and deliberately chosen streaming, with the general-purpose commercial feed excluded from the ordinary day. A map answers a question about getting somewhere. A selected film, album or concert can occupy a chosen interval and end. Streaming requires limits of its own, especially where autoplay and recommendations dissolve that endpoint. The principle is a connection authorised to perform a bounded task, followed by an effective return to unclaimed time. A society capable of regulating the uses of powerful technologies can debate such restrictions seriously. We should stop treating the present distribution of access as a sacred settlement beyond democratic reconsideration.
Any enforceable restriction would need to preserve emergency communication, accessibility, healthcare, education and people's ability to seek information without ideological permission. Those requirements should shape the law and the device. They should also prevent useful exceptions becoming excuses for restoring an unrestricted feed. Deliberate research on a computer, communication with a distant relative and a mobile application continuously soliciting attention involve different relationships to time and choice. We can design for those differences. The future I want would make high capacity networks available where they serve a clear human purpose and make predatory commercial occupation of spare time difficult or unlawful. The technical work should begin with that public objective, instead of assuming that every existing business practice must remain possible.
I would refuse a reform that replaced commercial surveillance with an obligation to identify oneself before reading. Privacy, anonymity and access to dissenting ideas belong within the project of reclaiming attention. Governments should constrain exploitative practices through clearly defined duties, independent oversight and rights of challenge. They should have to demonstrate why restrictions are necessary and how less intrusive alternatives were considered. Companies should face comparable demands when they invoke safety to justify collecting additional information. A person deserves protection from manipulation without being converted into a permanently verified subject of either corporate or state supervision. The moral authority of this argument depends on defending the freedom of the person whose attention is supposedly being protected.
Devices could make this boundary intelligible. A person could authorise a journey, a conversation or a selected programme without opening every other channel of solicitation. Permissions could expire when the task ends, with a deliberate action required to begin something else. Such arrangements would require testing and accommodate people whose needs differ. Their organising commitment would remain clear: the device should carry out the person's purpose and relinquish its claim when that purpose is fulfilled. Product teams should be required to defend designs that frustrate this relationship. The present expectation that people must continually negotiate with an apparatus they supposedly command is humiliating. An instrument purchased to serve its owner should not behave as though every completed task authorises another intrusion.
Practical changes already have regulatory expression. The European Commission's July 2025 guidelines on protecting minors recommend private accounts by default, greater control over recommendations and disabling features associated with excessive use, including autoplay, streaks and push notifications.[14] These recommendations identify decisions that designers can change. In February 2026, the Commission also announced preliminary findings that TikTok's addictive design breached the Digital Services Act, addressing features including infinite scroll and its recommendation system. Those findings remained preliminary at that stage, with the company's defence and further procedure still required.[15] Even with that qualification, the direction deserves attention: regulators were examining the organisation of the product itself, extending scrutiny to features around which continuous use had been built.
Australia's social media minimum age regime, in effect from 10 December 2025, requires covered platforms to take reasonable steps to prevent under-sixteens from creating or keeping accounts.[16] Its existence establishes neither that every implementation is desirable nor that its benefits have already been proved. Restrictions must be evaluated for effectiveness, privacy and their effects on young people who rely on online support. An age threshold also leaves adult users confronting the same commercial incentives. We should demand evidence about outcomes while pursuing design duties that extend beyond childhood. Companies must never be allowed to imply that a product becomes ethically unobjectionable on a person's sixteenth birthday. The wish to belong remains commercially exploitable long after a statutory boundary has been crossed.
The economic structure requires intervention too. The ACCC's final Digital Platform Services Inquiry report, released in June 2025, reiterated the need for reform addressing competition and consumer harms.[17] Departure becomes harder when services control access to audiences and relationships that people cannot readily move elsewhere. Effective portability and carefully designed interoperability can reduce that dependence, provided they preserve privacy and do not require disclosing other people's information. Public bodies should maintain channels they control. Artists should be able to cultivate audiences through their own websites and direct subscriptions. Alternatives need investment, usable tools and a culture willing to participate in them. Corporate dominance survives partly through the expectation that everybody else will stay. Institutions can help weaken that expectation by making an exit practical.
I want the platforms to become lame, a word whose social force the industry understands perfectly when deploying anxiety about being left behind. I want their theatrical emergencies, numerical status games and unsolicited recommendations to acquire the embarrassment of a discredited fashion. People should feel free to decline an account without explaining themselves. An influencer's commercial familiarity should cease to command automatic admiration. Some businesses may adapt to a world that respects boundaries; others may collapse when their old methods become unacceptable or unprofitable. I would welcome the collapse of arrangements whose survival requires continued intrusion. Their owners have no entitlement to preserve a revenue stream at the expense of everyone else's capacity to inhabit an ordinary day.
Yet public rejection needs somewhere to lead. Libraries, parks, community venues and affordable cultural life give people places in which relationships can grow beyond a feed. Accessible public transport and safe local spaces make meeting possible. A family exhausted by work and isolated by cost cannot simply purchase a more sociable life through superior discipline. Reclaiming attention therefore belongs alongside the work of making everyday life worth attending to. The replacements should be tangible enough to survive an inconvenient evening: a nearby place to go, a group that meets regularly, a website that answers the question, a friend whose telephone number you possess. Freedom needs conditions in which it can be exercised without exceptional resources.
We also need to rebuild a culture of completion. Read something until its argument becomes clear. Let a film end before another begins. Allow a disagreement to require thought before issuing a response. Institutions can support these habits by reducing unnecessary demands and respecting periods of unavailability. Individuals can help by accepting that silence often means somebody is living. Such changes sound ordinary because the capacities being defended are ordinary. Their ordinariness makes the history of their erosion more shameful. We tolerated an economy that placed commercial claims on the basic intervals through which people recover perspective, then described the effort to preserve those intervals as a specialised lifestyle. A decent society would make that preservation unremarkable.
I hope my daughter eventually asks how adults allowed any of this to become normal. I hope the question comes with the astonishment of someone who has never been required to bargain for quiet inside her own mind. I will have to explain convenience, ambition, loneliness and the immense sums available to those who organised our dependence. I also want to explain that people became angry enough to change the arrangement. They stopped confusing familiarity with legitimacy. They removed institutions from commercial enclosures, demanded effective boundaries and made other ways of living together attractive again. I want her to know that a dark era can end through decisions made by people who cease treating its continuation as inevitable.
The companies should understand the judgement I want that future to pass. They were given access to human vulnerability and made exploitation routine. They dressed surveillance in the language of relevance, sold interruption as participation and encouraged people to experience departure as disappearance. Those practices deserve rejection with enough conviction to alter law, culture and balance sheets. I want their presumption of permanent access broken. I want useful networks placed within limits that people can enforce. Above all, I want my daughter to inherit the time and privacy needed to discover what she thinks before anyone begins bidding for her next reaction. Brains reclaimed means people recovering authority over the conditions of their own attention, and keeping it.
References
[1] Federal Trade Commission. 2024. A Look Behind the Screens: Examining the Data Practices of Social Media and Video Streaming Services. Staff report and accompanying findings, 19 September. Source
[2] European Data Protection Board. 2023. Guidelines 03/2022 on deceptive design patterns in social media platform interfaces: how to recognise and avoid them. Version 2.0, adopted 14 February. Executive summary and sections 2 and 3. Source
[3] Stothart, Cary, Ainsley Mitchum and Courtney Yehnert. 2015. The attentional cost of receiving a cell phone notification. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 41(4): 893-897. DOI 10.1037/xhp0000100. Source
[4] Castelo, Noah, Kostadin Kushlev, Adrian F. Ward, Michael Esterman and Peter B. Reiner. 2025. Blocking mobile internet on smartphones improves sustained attention, mental health, and subjective well-being. PNAS Nexus 4(2): pgaf017. DOI 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgaf017. Source
[5] Allcott, Hunt, Luca Braghieri, Sarah Eichmeyer and Matthew Gentzkow. 2020. The Welfare Effects of Social Media. American Economic Review 110(3): 629-676. DOI 10.1257/aer.20190658. Link provides the authors' prepublication manuscript. Source
[6] Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. 2023. Scrutiny of influencers and businesses for misleading advertising and online reviews continues. Findings of the influencer sweep, 7 December. Source
[7] European Commission and Consumer Protection Cooperation authorities. Sweeps. Section: 2023 sweep on influencers, covering 576 reviewed influencers. Accessed 1 November 2026. Source
[8] Brady, William J., Julian A. Wills, John T. Jost, Joshua A. Tucker and Jay J. Van Bavel. 2017. Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content in social networks. PNAS 114(28): 7313-7318. DOI 10.1073/pnas.1618923114. Source
[9] Brady, William J., Killian McLoughlin, Tuan N. Doan and Molly J. Crockett. 2021. How social learning amplifies moral outrage expression in online social networks. Science Advances 7(33): eabe5641. DOI 10.1126/sciadv.abe5641. Source
[10] Vosoughi, Soroush, Deb Roy and Sinan Aral. 2018. The spread of true and false news online. Science 359(6380): 1146-1151. DOI 10.1126/science.aap9559. Source
[11] Guess, Andrew M., et al. 2023. How do social media feed algorithms affect attitudes and behavior in an election campaign? Science 381: 398-404. DOI 10.1126/science.abp9364. Researcher-hosted abstract and publication record. Source
[12] Gauthier, Germain, Roland Hodler, Philine Widmer and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya. 2026. The political effects of X's feed algorithm. Nature 652: 416-423. Published online 18 February. DOI 10.1038/s41586-026-10098-2. Source
[13] National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2024. Social Media and Adolescent Health. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. Summary and chapter 4. DOI 10.17226/27396. Source
[14] European Commission. 2025. Commission publishes guidelines on the protection of minors. Guidelines under the Digital Services Act, 14 July. Source
[15] European Commission. 2026. Commission preliminarily finds TikTok's addictive design in breach of the Digital Services Act. Preliminary findings, 6 February. Source
[16] eSafety Commissioner. Social media age restrictions. Official account of the Australian social media minimum age obligations, which took effect on 10 December 2025. Accessed 1 November 2026. Source
[17] Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. 2025. Digital Platform Services Inquiry 2020-25: March 2025 final report. Released 23 June 2025. Source
