This paper was written by Helena Puig of Build Up. It is part of a collaboration under Ashoka’s Tech & Humanity initiative, a global network of leading social entrepreneurs committed to ensuring tech works for the good of people and planet. This community is concerned about the societal and environmental harms of the data economy and is building innovative frameworks and tools to mitigate these harms.
Online polarization is a negative externality that results from the incentives of the attention economy.
This paper argues that many societal divides today are negatively impacted by patterns of digital content consumption and interaction driven by algorithmically mediated platforms. However, these digital platforms were not set up in order to distribute divisive content or create polarizing interactions. Rather, digital platforms produce these societal divides as a by-product of a profit maximizing strategy that governs the content and interactions they promote, and results in polarization online that translates into societal divides offline. As such, online polarization should be seen as a taxable negative externality of surveillance capitalism.
There is widespread agreement that algorithmically mediated platforms are degrading the digital space and the social fabric of societies. Current policy approaches to address the negative societal impact of digital platforms, whether through content moderation or changes to algorithm design, require the collaboration of companies. These approaches face a fundamental challenge: it is in the financial interest of digital platform companies to spread content that is engaging, divisive content is engaging, and platforms are not incentivized to increase their accuracy in detecting or reducing the distribution of polarizing content. Digital platform companies will never invest as much on content moderation as would be required, and are unlikely to make changes to algorithms that limit engagement. We need a different policy approach, one that addresses the financial incentives that lead platform companies to build algorithms whose feedback loops and unintended consequences result in polarization.
We argue that online polarization is a negative externality of algorithmically mediated platforms that results from the incentives of surveillance capitalism and the attention economy. If we understand online polarization as a negative externality, then there is a policy argument in favor of creating a financial disincentive to its production. This could be done by taxing polarization as a negative externality, and we explore five possible avenues for taxation: one based on a direct measure of polarization, four based on proxies that affect the production of online polarization. We reject two of these proxies as not viable or inappropriate.
Taxing polarization as a negative externality would create a financial disincentive to online polarization. Researching the connection between personalization / content targeting based on certain kinds of personal data and polarization outcomes, in order to understand whether introducing a non-linear tax on large databases might reduce polarization. Recognising that much work remains to be done to make these taxation options viable, we propose two concrete next steps
- Piloting approaches to measure the “polarization footprint” of digital platforms, and the viability of proposing a taxation regime based on this measure;
- Researching the connection between personalization / content targeting based on certain kinds of personal data and polarization outcomes, in order to understand whether introducing a non-linear tax on large databases might reduce polarization.
Overall, this paper sets out options for credible policy pathways to make surveillance capitalism more expensive in order to reduce the impact of digital platforms on societal divides. We invite challenge to the assumptions that lead us to argue for taxation, and discussion on the viability of concrete tax regimes proposed. This is the start of a longer and much needed debate.