The harms of social media (addiction, misinformation, polarization, mental health crises, sexualization of young girls) are not accidental side effects but predictable outcomes of the attention-optimization incentive; this was foreseeable in 2013 when Harris warned that attention incentives would lead to addiction and polarization.
causalpending
Speaker
Tristan HarrisEvidence Quote
“the stories we told about social media are all true it's not that those things aren't true it's just that Facebook and Twitter and Tik tok's business model is not helping people join like-minded communities the business model is attention”
Source
AI: Grappling with a New Kind of Intelligence | World Science Festival— World Science FestivalCreated: 8/10/2026, 10:49:40 PM
My Notes
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