Pay Attention: a Call to Regulate the Attention Market and Prevent Algorithmic Emotional Governance

Attention has become a commodified resource: Over the past 20 years, web platforms have industrialized the capture of human attention by weaponizing insights from psychology, neuroscience, and sociology, transforming attention into a profitable advertising market at an unprecedented scale.

Cognitive manipulation creates widespread harms beyond advertising: The paper identifies multiple detrimental side effects of attention-capturing techniques, including opinion polarization, misinformation spread, and threats to public health, economies, and democratic systems—harms that extend far beyond the original goal of making targeted ads more effective.

All internet users are now a vulnerable population: Rather than affecting only susceptible groups, the generalization of attention-capturing techniques means that entire user bases become vulnerable to manipulation through exploitation of cognitive biases and emotional triggers.

Current practices are fundamentally misaligned with the common good: The paper argues that the web's current attention economy is unsustainable for civilization and represents a case where technology is actively working against collective welfare rather than serving it.

Regulation is necessary and urgent: The paper calls for regulatory action against attention-capturing practices, framing this as a critical governance issue requiring intervention across multiple disciplines and policy domains.