Protection for Attention as a Common Good

By Evan Gold

The Issue In Pocket

The US needs better policy for protecting kids online. The lack of protection that adolescents receive online is one of the causes behind a new public health crisis: Tech addiction in kids.

Currently, social media companies are shielded from most liability by 26 words in the Communications Decency Act of 1996: “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider” [1]. This law was meant to protect online messaging boards as public forums, releasing companies from the responsibility of acting as moderators of user generated content. But these platforms have evolved, and the policy regulating them must too.

Social media companies today are not public forums. They are entertainment companies peddling social connection. In the DeCal I teach, Info 98: Becoming Tech Intentional, I have students run a test. I have them open up instagram and scroll through the first 20 posts, counting how many come from people they actually know. Often students report somewhere between one and five posts from people they have met in real life. The most common number is zero. Content optimized for engagement fills the difference; again, these platforms are not public forums or messaging boards. These companies have found that the content that best maximizes time spent on platform (and therefore ad revenue) is emotionally inflammatory, very funny, and disturbing. And we love it. As social mammals, we are biologically wired to crave the clickbait and brainrot, and as adults, it is something we can choose to engage with. Adolescents, however, go in primed and unprotected.

Adolescents today grow up with digital technology as social infrastructure. 

Teens ages 13-18 averaged 8 hours and 39 minutes of total media use per day from 2015-2021 [4]. 4.8 hours of that time is spent on social media [5]. In that time they are exposed to the best of the internet and the worst of it. These companies cater it all. Section 230 ensures that they have no incentive to protect the wellbeing of young people. If a kid is most engaged by content promoting eating disorders or self-harm, that is the content they are going to be served. And the results, on a public health level, have been catastrophic; especially for young girls.

Emergency room visits for non-fatal self harm among girls ages 10-14 increased 311 percent from 2010 (when Facebook passed 500 million users) to 2022 [3].

Facebook’s own internal research found that “32% of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse” [4]. 

More generally, it’s been found that about a quarter of young people exhibit “problematic smartphone usage” with “at least some element of dysfunctional use, such as anxiety when the phone was not available or neglect of other activities” [6].

Plausible Policy Solutions

What are some plausible ways in which policy might bring about change in this landscape? As considered in the review article “There’s No Such Thing as Free Brain Time”, the effects of policy interventions may hope to serve adolescence in three distinct ways [2]:

• Inform: Interventions that seek to educate users on the negative effects of excessive screen time; think the particularly horrifying warning labels included on the boxes of European cigarettes. Anecdotally, this effect would seem to be the weakest of the three. The majority of adolescents I encounter as part of my work with Project Reboot are aware of the negative effects that excessive screen time has on their well being, but they lack the resources to pursue healthier alternatives.
• Restrict: Efforts which ban problematic features or limit the usage of vulnerable individuals. An example of this might be the nationwide social media ban for youth under 16 as applied by Australia in December 2025. Key to these restrictions is the massive fines that apply to these companies should they fail to take reasonable steps for the removal of youth on their platforms. As the age at which adolescents first encounter social media continues to pervade further into the core socially developmental years, blanket restrictions offer a chance to delay the onset of social media as nefarious social infrastructure.
• Guide: As defined by Belgoun et al, “Guide measures aim to encourage or incentivize a change of behavior.” These guiding measures can be further categorized into those which promote user friendly design and those which promote socially beneficial  economic incentives. Much of the recent judicial and media attention associated with the Meta Trials has been focused on user design. As part of New Mexico’s investigation into the ways in which Meta enables predatory behavior, investigators posing as adolescent girls on meta’s platforms were repeatedly solicited for sex: This occurrence does not constitute a design flaw, but the perverse optimization of incentives under failing regulation. As part of regulating these platforms for the benefit of public health, their design must be addressed.

The Promise of a Pegouvian Tax

Lastly, worth considering is the second guiding option; the promise of a Pegouvian or Social Benefit Tax used to disincentivize companies from promoting problematic usage. While taxation has its obvious flaws as a response to negative externalities, a social benefit tax stands to force companies to internalize their negative externalities as part of their cost function. I particularly like this option as I believe it could be fine tuned to address particularly problematic usage. Take for instance a tax applied to companies on ad revenue from adolescence accounts using their platform for more than four hours in a day. While the regulatory hurdles required to set this up would be logistically complex, the tax would allow for legislatures to attack the massive problem of adolescent tech addition with both the carrot and the stick: The forfeitures excised from companies manipulating the well being of young people could be used to improve the well being of young people. For example, the money generated from such a social benefit tax might be applied to expanding equity to afterschool programs for underprivileged middle school students, thereby addressing some of the underlying problems responsible for our current crisis of digital dependence. 

As we enter this new regulatory landscape, the complex problems posed by the youth tech addiction crisis will require complex solutions. The scope of the problem shouldn’t be underestimated: Our battle to protect kids online will be one of the defining fights of our generation. It is vital we respond swiftly with thoughtful policy.

Works Cited

1. US Congress. 1996. Telecommunications Act of 1996. Pub. L. No. 104-104, 110 Stat. 56. Codified as amended at 47 U.S.C. § 230.
2. Belgroun, Hamza, Franck Michel, and Fabien Gandon. 2025. “No Such Thing as Free Brain Time: For a Pigouvian Tax on Attention Capture.” Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society 8 (October): 367–78. https://doi.org/10.1609/aies.v8i1.36555.
3. Mercado, Melissa C., Kristin Holland, Rachel W. Leemis, Deb Stone, and Jing Wang. 2017. “Trends in Emergency Department Visits for Nonfatal Self-Inflicted Injuries Among Youth Aged 10 to 24 Years in the United States, 2001–2015.” JAMA 318 (19): 1931–33. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2017.13317.
4. US Congress. Senate. Protecting Kids Online: Testimony of Frances Haugen, Facebook Whistleblower. Hearing before the Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security of the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation. 117th Cong., 1st sess., October 5, 2021
5. Rideout, Victoria, Alanna Peebles, Supreet Mann, and Michael B. Robb. 2022. The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens, 2021. San Francisco, CA: Common Sense.
6. Rothwell, Jonathan. 2023. “Teens Spend Average of 4.8 Hours on Social Media Per Day.” Gallup. October 13, 2023. https://news.gallup.com/poll/512576/teens-spend-average-hours-social-media-per-day.aspx.
7. Sohn, Sei Yon, Philippa Rees, Bethany Wildridge, Nicola J. Kalk, and Ben Carter. 2019. “Prevalence of Problematic Smartphone Usage and Associated Mental Health Outcomes Amongst Children and Young People: A Systematic Review, Meta-analysis and GRADE of the Evidence.” BMC Psychiatry 19 (1): 356. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-019-2350-x.

Photo Credit: CJ Santos