From the attention economy to the aggression economy

The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, has called on British ministers to get tough on social media giants to stop disinformation. The plea comes after the publication of a study which found that hostile narratives against immigration have soared, linking it to a (false) increase in criminality in the city. Specifically, in the last two years, messages describing London as a particularly dangerous place have increased by between 150% and 200%, while content denouncing the impact of migration on the country's capital has risen by 350%.

For some years now, we have been talking about the attention economy: how major global companies have designed mechanisms to keep us hooked to their services while exploiting our personal data. It is increasingly evident that the most effective glue to achieve this adherence is anger. The same London mayor has coined the term the outrage economy and warns that a lack of action could lead to a resurgence of domestic terrorism from those who believe the conspiracy theories they find online. Therefore, if we have already moved from the attention economy to the outrage economy, perhaps we are only a gentle nudge away from the modulators that govern algorithms to move to the aggression economy. One only needs to take a brief look at X to realize that this same problem is observed in Catalonia: the bulk of messages talking about crimes seem to only be of interest from the alleged origin of the perpetrators. The people are sovereign and must be able to debate freely, but if networks distribute loudspeakers according to who generates the most noise –and abdicate from preventing falsehoods– the debate will move from rationality to something more sinister.