Andrew MacDougall: We should have to pay to use social media
Just what is our time and attention worth?
By: Andrew MacDougall
How much do you love your Facebook account? Your Instagram? How about X(Twitter) or TikTok?
Right now, you don’t have to love your Facebook account. You don’t have to love any of your social media accounts because you’re never forced into a conversation about value when it comes to spending time on these platforms. That’s because the platforms are free to use.
And who doesn’t like free?
But if you did have to pay $10 per month to use Facebook, would you do it? Because that’s roughly what Facebook makes off of you each month as they sell you to their tens of thousands of advertisers as you scroll your News Feed. And how does Facebook make more money off you? By keeping you on Facebook for as long as it can. And the same goes for the other platforms, too.
Which brings us to attention, a.k.a. the finite resource that has become the world’s most valuable commodity. The major social media companies who are all fighting for your attention are locked in a zero-sum game; if you’re on someone else’s platform they can’t make money off of you. And so, they’ll do whatever it takes to lure you back.
Put differently, in a world where attention is the most valuable resource, addiction becomes the business model. That’s why the major platforms of what has become our “attention economy” now use every trick in the cognitive psychology playbook to keep you on your screens. Notifications, auto-play, infinite scroll; meet the platform features that activate your brain’s dopamine reward pathways (the same pathways targeted by illicit drugs, good food and sex) and keep you coming back for more. Most of us will now pick up our smartphones absent any provocation because we crave the intermittent variable rewards offered up by our phones and the apps that live on them. Welcome to what former Google design ethicist Tristan Harris calls “the race to the bottom of the brainstem.”
In the attention economy, the news industry is but one class and series of providers of content in an infinite ocean of content. What’s more, it is a provider of expensive to assemble and distribute content in a world awash with cheaper and easier alternatives, in the form of our collective opinions and micro-life updates. And unlike other content providers, the news can’t — or at least shouldn’t — make stuff up. The news industry’s lodestars are staid things like fact and accuracy in content written or produced about things that actually happened, not the more emotive content that tweaks our brains and sends content hurtling across the algorithmicly-goverened platforms of the attention economy.
Unless legislators and regulators acknowledge the realities and incentives of the attention economy, any effort to “save” the news is bound to fail. There isn’t enough money in the government’s coffers to make bylaws more interesting than Epstein. And yet, the Canadian government continues to beaver away down blind alleys like the Online News Act, with the beneficiaries in the mainstream media too chicken to call it what it is: palliative care in the form of a bribe. Absent a change in approach, the vast majority of the news media will die.
And then we’ll all be fucked. Because we don’t want to live in a society where a bunch of dedicated professionals aren’t crawling up the backsides of the people with power, whether that’s governments or social media platforms that now have more money (and lobbying power) than God. Our society doesn’t function well absent scrutiny. No person or system does. You might not like the current iteration of the news media, but its function remains important and we need to keep that function alive.
So sorry, Mark Carney et. al, the task before us isn’t how to make the traditional news media solvent in the digital era; it’s how to create an environment in which the news can once again thrive. And that environment isn’t one in which attention is chased after and commodified by the world’s richest and most powerful companies. As a society, we have to start valuing our time and attention.
Unlike other so-called “sin” industries like alcohol and tobacco, attention can’t be tackled by a straightforward sin tax applied at the point of purchase. Returning to our opening argument, the major platforms of the attention economy are free. There is no simple bolt-on point for tax. And while overall platform revenues can be targeted, the major tech companies are well-practiced at evading taxation and a revenue tax applied after our attention has already been mined doesn’t change the addiction business model.
An engagement-based tax, however, one tied to how long and how much we did on these platforms, would produce a different effect. Imagine if your fee for access to Facebook was tied to how long you spent on it and how much you did while you were there? Imagine having to cough up a few pennies every time you swiped on TikTok? You’d have a sense of how much your time and attention was worth then, wouldn’t you?
That’s the conversation we need to have. Just what is our time and attention worth? Because it’s not just the news that’s getting hammered by the unconstrained race for our attention. The incentives of the attention economy also do things like harm our mental health, particularly amongst our young people, and particularly among younger women, as research from academics such as Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge shows. The attention economy is what gives Donald Trump his superpowers, and it’s what gives Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and other authoritarians their ability to mess with the information economies in our democracies.
Returning to incentives. If Facebook or TikTok had your money up front each month in the form of a fee paid to them by you, they would not have to try and glue you to the platform each day. They would focus instead on how to make their platform the best and most useful platform, not the most addictive. And then you would have a proper decision to make as to where you spend your money: on the news, or on a social media service where you are the customer, not the product being sold.
At least the news has a chance in that fight. And if it loses there, it will truly deserve to die.
Andrew MacDougall is a partner at Trafalgar Strategy and is a former director of communications to former prime minister Stephen Harper. His policy paper Dismantling the Attention Economy: How the battle for attention is killing the traditional news media and eroding the foundations of Western democracies was recently published by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
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Interesting article, and I agree 100%. Of note, I concluded way back in the infancy of social media (many years ago) that such networks were not worthy of my time and attention. Since then and to this day, I don’t use them, ever, full stop. I have no desire or itch to use them. I also tend to have far more available time in my life as compared to other walks of life I’ve come across — simply because I don’t allow myself to get sucked into the social media vortex of attention-grabbing nonsense. While I recognize what I’m describing here is nothing more than good old fashioned self-discipline, more simply, I’d argue life’s too short to squander in endless scrolling on these social networks. There’s far more to life than being glued to a screen. While I obtain my information and news from trusted sources and exercise my own critical thinking of same, I also recognize that people are generally not very inclined to scrutinize their information sources by practiced behaviour. I agree that it would be better to have social media companies charge a monthly user fee; but I also see the fight that will emerge because social media companies want eyes glued to their services for as long as possible. I also think (as we have all seen) that government interventions in the online space have proven incapable of dealing with the issues they claim to tackle, while also fostering new ones that they in-turn fail to address at all. So I’d say the best solution comes back to individual choices. If we all recognize these pervasive issues with the social media companies, what are we as individuals doing to counter the effects of those issues? Social media networks are built on the premise of algorithmic people-powered engagement. Thus, it’s the people — individual users and content creators — that impact the algorithms these networks rely on to keep people captivated. Therefore, I believe it’s the people’s online behaviours that ultimately needs to dictate the changes needed. As for me, I’ll do my part by sticking to my social media boycott and denying those bastards their revenue generating capacity over my eyes and brain.
I fully agree there's a problem with social media shifting attention from real news. This has possibly more to do with the deteriorating quality of the mainstream news media than the author claims but there's a real problem nonetheless. That said, it is difficult for me to imagine that the solution lies in yet another tax. Of those we already have plenty thank you.