Is exchanging your attention and data for entertainment too high a price?

When you log on, you know the cost of "free" access to email, social media, and gaming is paid somehow. The adverts around the page suggest it's just marketers. You're learning to spot the difference between product placement and an authentic profile, while they become less obvious every day.

But the Meta court cases, the Wall Street Journal's Facebook Files, and documentaries like The Social Dilemma and The Instagram Effect tell a different story. More is sold than first meets the eye, and most of it happens without your conscious awareness, let alone your consent.

Consider the scale. TikTok is owned by ByteDance. Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook are Meta's. YouTube and Google sit under Alphabet. Google alone handles roughly 90% of all search engine use globally. Alphabet's financial worth is around $4.8 trillion — comparable to US healthcare spending, and higher than Japan's GDP. Amazon owns a sprawling subsidiary network. Social media users now number 5.79 billion — roughly more than the combined populations of Asia and South America.

These companies are richer, in both financial and intellectual capital, than many sovereign states. The crucial difference is that they were never designed to serve the public. They were designed to serve shareholder profit.

That model has consequences. Algorithms distribute information across the globe, in dozens of languages, at extraordinary speed. Human moderators cannot keep up with the pace. By the time a breach is spotted, the damage is often already done — the distribution of harmful content, the incitement to violence, the facilitation of trafficking, the silencing of critics in dialects nobody flagged in time.

These failures aren't always accidental, either. One internal report on trafficking, submitted by an expert in Poland, sat for eighteen months before anything changed.

The social media companies may not be motivated to mitigate damage to individuals. In fact, after noticing that users became passive to professionally perfected content, Meta platforms changed their algorithms to "enhance meaningful engagement." This led to an increase in anger, and in response, politicians changed their adverts to lean into that anger, competing for attention. When we log onto our favourite sites, we have no idea that our "attention" is being sold to facilitate these practices. When we notice an infuriating post in a sleepy haze late at night, when our energy is depleted and we can't hold in an angry thought, we contribute to the pool of angry posts that's biased toward enhancing "engagement" — which can unintentionally send our own mood into a downward spiral.

So here is the question worth sitting with: when you reach for your phone in a quiet moment, are you choosing to engage, or being baited by content that serves the profit of the platform rather than your own entertainment?

Next time you open an app, try pausing for a second first. Notice what you're actually giving away — your attention, your data, your emotional bandwidth. These companies have built empires on that exchange. The least you can do is notice what you're spending.