Social media redesigned to prevent attention driven harm
Reclaiming the social in social media
Social and Information NetworksComputers and SocietyHuman-Computer Interaction
Summary
Social media can cause problems like arguing, antisocial behavior, and mental health issues, mostly because they are designed to grab and hold our attention for profit. The authors explain that these problems don’t come from the idea of connecting people online, but from how these platforms operate within an attention economy. They suggest a new way to build social media based on four key ideas—purpose, alignment, transparency, and access—that results in a system where the harmful attention-seeking design isn’t possible. Their proposed design changes the experience to focus more on genuine connections tailored to each user.
What this means in practice
- •For social platform developers: Design new social media platforms that structurally prevent attention-seeking behavior by implementing properties like operator blindness and algorithmic sovereignty.
- •For privacy focused app makers: Create communication apps that emphasize user trust and transparency by enabling users to verify operations and control algorithms affecting their data.
A position paper. It proposes an approach and reports no results.
Authors
Luca Benn, Moritz Merz, David Grüning
Abstract
Concerns about polarization, antisocial behavior, and mental health have broadly led to two responses to social media: adapting platforms through moderation and prosocial design, and restricting access to these platforms through age limits and comparable measures. Both address consequences of social media while leaving the attention-driven architecture intact. We argue that the harms commonly attributed to social media arise not from technologies supporting social connection but from their implementation within the attention economy. In response, we ask what a digital social environment built for genuine human connection would look like. From four principles - Purpose, Alignment, Transparency, and Access - we can derive four technical properties that fulfill these principles: Operator Blindness, Algorithmic Sovereignty, Operational Parity, and Verifiability. To the best of our knowledge, no deployed alternative satisfies all four. We propose an architecture that does, making the attention economy not just discouraged but structurally impossible. We explain how the resulting user experience refocuses on each user's individual social environment and differs from that of current platforms.