What tech titans will do to get your attention online

Elon Musk's social media platform X, formerly Twitter, has been banned in Brazil. AFP

Hello? Are you there? Can I ask you a question? What do you think is the most valuable commodity in the world? Oil? Water? Gold? Diamonds? No, it isn’t. It’s you – or at least, your attention.

All kinds of people – in business, in advertising, social media companies and politicians – make no apologies for asking even silly questions (as I have just done) to grab your attention so that you are immediately drawn to a pop-up ad, sales pitch or product placement. If any of this seems familiar that is because every tech titan from Elon Musk to the owners of Google, Apple, Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram and others really does seem to want your ears, eyeballs and your credit card details.

Billions of consumers worldwide make up what in the 1960s the Nobel laureate Herbert Simon called “the attention economy”. It’s where the money is. It’s how advertisements work. It happened to me a few weeks ago shortly before our family summer holiday. I unwisely looked online for beach shoes. I have had similar products popping up on my laptop ever since. Perhaps the algorithm needs to note that it’s now autumn in Europe, so I’m not going to the beach for a while.

But as reported in The National, in this vast new world of online attention-seeking and salesmanship, governments worldwide are waking up to some of the problems. That’s now gone into overdrive. The government and court system in Brazil is in a public row with Mr Musk, chief executive of X, formerly Twitter. The court system in France is pursuing charges against Pavel Durov, the Russian-born owner of Telegram.

The EU is trying to figure out how to regulate, and what to regulate in the new wild west of information and AI. In Australia, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says that he wants “to see kids off their devices and on to the footy fields and the swimming pools and the tennis courts”.

As a result, his government is drawing up legislation to ban social media use for those under the age of 16. And a group of schools in England is trying to ban smartphones during the school day.

In all of this, Mr Musk appears to have embroiled himself in public rows on at least three continents. He has suggested Europe, and in particular the UK, faces a civil war. (I think he is wrong.) He has used X to back former US president Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. And beyond the battle with Brazil, he claims the Australian government is in some way “fascist”.

Mr Albanese responds that the tech billionaire “has a social responsibility”. Some tech leaders do understand that they are citizens, too, and have responsibilities beyond making money. Mr Musk argues that anyone seeking to limit his influence is in some way an enemy of freedom, while others suspect that his definition of freedom is his freedom to make a lot of money in the attention economy and exert political influence to benefit his businesses.

Musk resists those who wish to regulate content, because it will inevitably regulate his freedom to make money

The freedom of speech argument is, of course, important when it comes to regulations. But it is also highly problematic, given the nature of some content on X. There are also important caveats about the limit to freedom of speech. Two of the most acclaimed US Supreme Court justices – Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes – wrote a famous series of dissents in favour of free speech. But they also pointed out that freedom of speech does not include the freedom to shout “fire” in a crowded theatre and cause panic.

Nor does “freedom of speech” include the “right" to incite civil unrest, racial, ethnic, political or religious hatred, nor to include pornographic content. Yet on some social media platforms content in these categories are not difficult to find. The key point is that our eyeballs and brains are a marketable commodity. Our attention is valuable to tech billionaires and others. And if our attention is their economic strength, it is also their regulatory weakness.

That’s why Mr Musk resists those who wish to regulate content, because it will inevitably regulate his freedom to make money. As governments everywhere struggle to figure out what to do about increasingly powerful new technologies, platforms and the people who own them, you can be sure that this is going to be one of the biggest worldwide concerns for years ahead. But governments are not pitiful helpless giants. New international rules or at least codes of conduct will eventually emerge.

The EU’s 2022 Digital Markets Act stops the biggest tech companies from using their interlocking services to retain users and cut out rivals in everything from payment methods to online advertising and messaging apps. The penalties can be severe. The mood appears to be that the world of big tech companies has been a digital wild west for too long. And even in the wild west, the sheriff eventually rides into town and tries to establish some kind of law and order.