Our Work

We are developing sustained public-education campaigns created in language that resonates with young people, informed by evidence, and reinforced by the culture around them.

Rather than lecturing or shaming young people, our campaigns will expose how addictive digital technologies, including social media and AI, are designed to encourage compulsive use and manipulate attention for profit.

Our strategy is to reframe excessive scrolling and other compulsive use as surrendering agency rather than harmless entertainment, making it look less normal and less desirable. Taking back control of your attention and choosing to participate more fully in real life becomes the more attractive alternative.

We will use humor, irony and creative storytelling, with the goal of creating videos young people will share because they want to, not because someone paid to put them in their feeds.

The Meta settlement creates the possibility of doing this work at a far greater scale. The question now is whether its resources will be used to build a sustained national response.

The settlement will provide billions of dollars to states and establish significant new protections for young people. The 1998 tobacco settlement went further: it established and funded a national organization dedicated to changing behavior through sustained public education. The Meta settlement does not.

Attention Initiative is working to mobilize one million voices behind the call to use settlement resources to create a permanent, independently governed national institution dedicated to protecting young people from addictive digital technology.

We will also work directly with attorneys general and other leaders to advance that goal.