The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource

by Chris Hayes

being tagged and brought into a thread is the key driver for engagement in many platforms. Former Google employee Tristan Harris notes that this aspect of a platform like Facebook is optimized by the algorithm to supercharge normal social impulses. “We’re all vulnerable to social approval,” Harris writes. “But now our social approval is in the hands of tech companies. When I get tagged by my friend Marc, I imagine him making a conscious choice to tag me. But I don’t see how a company like Facebook orchestrated his doing that in the first place…by automatically suggesting all the faces people should tag (e.g. by showing a box with a 1-click confirmation, ‘Tag Tristan in this photo?’). So when Marc tags me, he’s actually responding to Facebook’s suggestion, not making an independent choice. But through design choices like this, Facebook controls the multiplier for how often millions of people experience their social approval on the line.”[51]