“Age limits on social media are a dead end”

Imagine walking into a library. The first thing that catches your eye is a poster with naked women and men, captioned: 'New: same-day loans of porn magazines.'

A bit further inside, you see shelves labelled 'Literature on how to commit acts of terror – both for the far right and the far left.'

This would of course never happen in the real world. Libraries are subject to restrictions and fulfil a democratic function as open, neutral meeting places. 

We need to build safe digital communities

But what about the digital world? 

There are no democratic institutions deciding how digital infrastructure should be developed for the common good.

“When companies like Meta and Google invest heavily in developing design features and algorithms intended to capture and steer our attention, democratic institutions must invest just as heavily in understanding and regulating these systems," says Sebastian Watzl. 

He is a researcher and philosopher at the University of Oslo.

"We must build digital communities where children and young people can participate safely, not shut them out,” he says.

“The debate misses the point.”

Watzl researches the attention economy. Together with colleagues, he has recently published a policy brief in which they argue that the debate on age limits for social media misses the real issue.

“We have debates about screen time and age limits on social media, but in reality, the problem we face is far more extensive. Our attention is in the hands of a few companies, like Google, Meta, and X, located in Silicon Valley,” sats Watzl.

The category 'social media' is not very precise

Part of the problem, Watzl believes, is that we have accepted this situation and become somewhat blind to what is happening. 

We think of them as purely technology companies, but in practice they operate as advertising agencies.

Another problem with the proposal to impose age restrictions on social media is that the category 'social media' is not very precise.

“What counts as social media differs from country to country. Search engines, digital marketplaces, and now AI as well, are other environments that steer our attention,” Watzl points out.

Three problems with age limits

There are three main problems with introducing age limits on social media, according to Watzl:

1. Children and young people should participate in public debate. We cannot simply remove them from social media without creating new, safe meeting places. This is about both democracy-building and children’s rights.
2. Age verification creates new privacy problems. In Australia, where an age limit was introduced in December, everyone who opens Facebook must scan their face.
3. Children and young people want spaces for social interaction without adult supervision. They will find other places to interact anyway. Companies will develop new services that do not formally fall under the category of 'social media.' The alternatives are not necessarily better.

“I believe the debate on age limits for social media is precisely the kind of distraction the companies are hoping for. In practice it involves very few restrictions for them,” says Watzl.

Our attention is easily captured

Watzl explains that attention is the basis for what we notice, learn, and remember. It is shaped and influenced by the physical, social, and digital environments we are in.

We can direct it ourselves – as you do when reading this article – but it has a fundamental weakness: it is highly receptive to stimuli and easy to capture, the researcher points out.

The platforms know exactly how this is best done. And stores do too, when they place chocolate near the checkout.

“What sticks in our consciousness, and what we overlook, is not random. Online, we are analysed by algorithms that tailor content to keep our attention for as long as possible," says Watzl.

He explains that addictive design features, like the like function, makes us repeatedly check how popular our posts are.

"In this way, the platforms function as an infrastructure that shapes our attention landscapes,” says Watzl.

Limits our freedom to think for ourselves

The concept of the attention economy stems from Nobel Prize-winning economist Herbert A. Simon. 

Already in the 1970s, he described the idea that while information is abundant, our attention is a scarce resource. “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” is one of his well-known sayings.

One of Google’s former strategists, James Williams, experienced this firsthand. 

He realised that all the technological stimuli he helped create made him profoundly distracted. So he left Google and became a philosopher instead.

Our attention must be freed

The liberation of human attention may be the decisive moral and political struggle of our time.

He writes this in his book Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy.

“The debate has focused heavily on how social media affects young people’s health. Meanwhile, something else that's extremely harmful to humans has been overlooked. Our capacity for self-determination is systematically shaped by forces we cannot resist – the forces that cause us to end up in the clutches of algorithms. In this way, our fundamental freedom to think for ourselves and pursue our own interests is undermined,” says Watzl.

Misuse of resources

It's not only our attention that's limited. Society’s resources are limited too. 

So, should we spend them on building a system of checks and age restrictions?

“Instead, the authorities should prioritise requirements for transparency in algorithmic systems and tighten up restrictions on data collection. We must be able to regain control over recommendation algorithms and be able to switch or leave platforms without losing our networks,” says Watzl.

Democracy presupposes that we are able to orient ourselves, and today we receive most of our information through digital interfaces. 

When these interfaces are controlled by a handful of companies, this concentration of power threatens both democratic values and autonomy.

“The companies influence what we see, how we think, and what gains political traction online. In doing so, they exert power over the very infrastructure of our minds and our social world,” the researcher says.

Sebastian Watzl researches the attention economy in the interdisciplinary projects GoodAttention and Salient Solutions.

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