This article originally appeared in the Ottawa Citizen.
By Andrew MacDougall, August 11, 2025
What’s the biggest problem facing the West today?
Sadly, there are several candidates vying for the title. There’s Donald Trump and his trade wars. Israel and Gaza. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And the slow creep of climate change. All of which are enormous, era-defining problems.
None of them, however, holds a candle to the number one issue facing Western democracies: the mass harvesting of human attention by technology companies. Several of the richest and most powerful companies in the world (e.g. Meta, Google) now make tens of billions a year selling a finite and non-renewable resource — our attention — to advertisers. Human beings have become the product being sold in a market they don’t fully understand.
That sounds overwrought until you consider that how we choose to direct our attention is the most important decision we make. Do we focus on a loved one as they tell us their problem? Contribute to a discussion at work? Sink into a good book to relax? Until recently, we’ve been the masters of directing our attention. But our attention is now increasingly directed for us. We are becoming slaves to our smartphones, where we are served an unending stream of content and notifications from the major platforms of what has become an “attention economy,” with social media being the worst offenders.
What’s more, the race for our attention is a zero-sum game. Unlike traditional media companies, who produced a news product in return for a fee, the content dealers of the digital age trade us in return for a fee from advertisers. And the longer we stay on their platforms, the more money they make. This breeds ruthlessness amongst the tech companies. They design product features that keep us “on screen” for as long as possible, while serving us the most addictive content possible (which, unlike that produced by a professional newsroom, doesn’t need to be accurate or relevant).
Studies show the attention economy is driving cognitive overload, addiction and worsening mental health, with raising rates of depression and reduced attention spans, particularly amongst children. Authoritarian regimes are also exploiting the social media landscape to spread mis- and disinformation through apps such as X, Facebook, TikTok, Signal and WeChat. And the social media companies have gutted the business models — and hence, accountability function — of the traditional news media, without replacing it.
Put simply, the rise of the attention economy is straining the foundations of Western democracies. The sheer breadth of its impacts and harms requires an integrated and comprehensive public policy response. Unfortunately, the same attention economy has significantly eroded our traditional forums for public discourse and debate, making effective responses more difficult to enact.
In a perfect world, we would pay to use the platforms of the attention economy and they would treat us as customers, not as their product. We would pay an upfront fee and they would compete for our custom based on utility — not, as they do now, on the addictiveness of their product features. But the tech companies won’t change their model until they’re forced.
The mass harvesting of human attention for the profit of a few wealthy platforms is socially corrosive. It must end. Canada must launch a Royal Commission to explore the full scale and scope of the threat posed by the attention economy.
The complexity of the issues raised by the mass harvesting of human attention deserve a systematic examination in a forum free from outside influence. How do the attention economy’s opaque algorithms work? How do these platforms impact our mental health? How do they target girls, and is this different for how they target boys? How do our foreign adversaries exploit the attention economy to undermine democratic processes, which the recent Hogue Inquiry into foreign interference partially addressed?
What is the impact of the resulting loss of accountable local journalism on the lower levels of government? More fundamentally, what do Canadians understand about data and advertising-based business models — whether for social media or search — and their consent to such use of their personal information?
Canadians deserve as neutral a reading on these subjects as is possible, and a Royal Commission is the best route to achieving it.
Andrew MacDougall is a London-based communications consultant and ex-director of communications to former prime minister Stephen Harper. He is the author of the newly published Macdonald-Laurier Institute study: Dismantling the attention economy: How the battle for attention is killing the traditional news media and eroding the foundations of Western democracies.
