TikTok has made headlines in recent months for the potential national security threat that it presents to the United States. I contend that there is a more alarming, yet largely unacknowledged, harm posed by TikTok and similar platforms: the large-scale theft of users’ attention. 

When the first major social media platforms emerged in the early 2000s, they promised enhanced communication and connection. Today, they have evolved past that original promise into something more sinister. The use of inherently addictive design techniques like infinite scroll and push notifications shows that social media companies do not want you spending time on other things that may align more closely with your own personal goals. They simply want you to increase your engagement on their platform to drive a profit. As the popular maxim goes, if a product is free, then you are the product. Or rather, your attention is the product. In today’s social media-powered attention economy, that sentiment rings true.

What is the attention economy?

The attention economy describes how companies–tech companies, in this case–vie for and trade in consumers’ attention rather than physical goods. Paying attention is valuable to us because it enables us to focus, to act on our aspirations and live out our lives. Our attention is valuable to social media companies because they ensnare it to boost engagement on their platform, thereby exposing users to more advertisements which they rely on to generate profit. These free digital platforms’ core business model relies on directing users’ attention away from their friends, hobbies, and even sleep, towards products and services for sale.

The distraction caused by social media is a problem because it can pull us away from the things that really enrich us in real life. Perhaps, like me, you wish you spent more time reading. Personally, reading a good book brings me more joy and leaves me feeling more fulfilled than scrolling through social media for hours, and yet I find myself spending far more time on the latter these days. Maybe you want to get back into your habit of drawing, or playing an instrument. Maybe you wish you’d spend more time calling your family members, or exercising, or even sleeping. Aside from the feeling you get when you know you’ve wasted time, research has found that doom scrolling causes mental stress, disrupts sleep, and worsens social health.

These technologies rob us of our agency and our ability to direct our attention to what we actually want to do in the first place. While enriching activities are subjective, no one actively decides they want to spend their day maximizing their social media engagement. In my head, I know that I would rather sit down with a good novel rather than scroll TikTok for hours. However, due to the omnipresence of deceptive design techniques, I cannot stop.

This is not to say that every second we live needs to be productive. There is minimal harm in social media use in moderation. But that is just the thing–these platforms are not meant to be used in moderation. Thousands of the brightest minds around the world work for a handful of companies–TikTok, Meta, X, and Snap chief among them–and spend hours creating the most addictive digital experiences possible. Just take it from Aza Raskin, the self-proclaimed inventor of the infinite scroll feature, who has calculated that the tool wastes the equivalent of 200,000 human lifetimes per day.

Social media gives users what they want

The real tragedy is that social media capitalizes upon and exacerbates our existing social and human flaws. Sometimes, we want social media to distract us.

For one, social media plays into human insecurities and the need to project an ideal image of oneself to a broad audience. On Instagram, for example, users perfectly curate their social media feeds so that they project the version of themselves that they want others to see. TikTok users lament their inability to enjoy their vacation until they have captured a perfect photo for Instagram. No matter that the audience is the thousands of followers and profile viewers who have no direct stake in one’s life.

Secondly, social media also enables users to feel a sense of instant gratification. Even if this supply of contentment is not as enriching as human interaction, it is evergreen. We can get instant, albeit shallow, entertainment, praise, and knowledge all through the same few apps on our phones. 

Social media as an agent of capitalism

Companies leverage social media, too. Inputting personal demographic and behavioral information into social media apps enables targeted advertising and surveillance capitalism. Coined by Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff, surveillance capitalism is “an economic system built on the secret extraction and manipulation of human data.”

Furthermore, social media has introduced infinite new fora where goods and services can be advertised and exchanged. For example, TikTok’s new Shop feature has irritated some users, yet it is pushed at them no matter what. Social media is a tool of consumerism.

These examples serve to show how social media is addicting, in part, because we want it to be so. These digital platforms and the engineers and designers behind them play on our base desires. However, if we do not attempt to understand how these mechanisms work, or recognize the extent to which they play on our desires, it will be impossible to take our attention back. 

Where do we go from here? 

With the recent TikTok ban and subsequent reinstatement, the conversation has been focused on the national security threat of the platform. Concerns have centered around data privacy and covert foreign influence campaigns.

In the House, members of the Select Committee on the CCP expressed their concerns about China influencing young users’ minds through propaganda on TikTok. The national security debate is significant, but we cannot allow it to overshadow the more subtle, yet pernicious, issue of TikTok and other social media platforms stealing our attention. Because ultimately, any attempts by foreign adversaries to influence users’ thoughts and opinions will be enabled by the attention economy. TikTok and other platforms collect data points to create continually more addicting digital experiences that we are hopeless to escape from, unless a change is made. 

| “At the end of a 100 year life, these teens will have lost over 18 years of their lives on social media.” |

A 2023 Gallup survey found that teens spend an average of five hours on social media per day. Assume that these teens use social media at the same rate from the time they are 13 years old until they are 100 years old–not a very far-fetched assumption given how ubiquitous these platforms are after only twenty years of existence. A simple calculation reveals that, at the end of a 100 year life, these teens will have lost over 18 years of their lives on social media.

Whether we are in thrall to the Chinese government, TikTok, the US government, Meta, Snap, or any other actor, the problem is that we are losing years of our lives to these platforms without even knowing it. Even just realizing this loss of attention and becoming aware of it is a revolutionary act. We must reach that realization before any substantive change can be implemented to fight against platforms’ monopoly over our time, our attention, and our lives. The next article in this series addresses the potential ways we might do so.