Our mission
Help more people use their powerful devices as a bicycle for the mind, a tool that carries them where they choose to go, and not as a conveyor belt of endless entertainment slop.
The Attention Initiative is a cultural intervention designed to empower intentional use of powerful digital technology, especially in young people.
We want to get people to use their powerful devices more like a bicycle for the mind and less like a conveyor belt of endless entertainment slop.
Our goal is to shrink the gap between knowing the harm and changing the norm.
We measure against change in understanding, change in sentiment, and change in practices: reduced or intentional screen time.
Attention Initiative exists to reduce the compulsive use of addictive digital technology, especially among young people.
Young people are growing up inside a technological environment engineered to capture and hold their attention. Families, schools, and young people themselves are being asked to manage a problem they did not create and cannot solve alone.
Supernormal stimulus: an exaggerated version of a natural trigger that elicits a stronger behavioral or psychological response than the actual stimulus for which an organism evolved.
Wallace warns that as technology gets better at delivering pure pleasure, we will have to build real machinery inside our guts to turn it off.
Wireheading: hacking a brain’s (or an AI’s) reward system to trigger pleasure or “success” signals directly, without achieving anything in the real world. The term comes from 1950s experiments by James Olds and Peter Milner, who implanted electrodes in the reward centers of rats’ brains. Given a lever to stimulate themselves, the rats pressed it thousands of times an hour, ignoring food and water until they collapsed from exhaustion.
The slow poison of endless fantasy: how small, daily acts of escapism gradually rob a person of their drive, potential, and connection to reality.
Half of American teenagers spend at least four hours a day on screens outside of schoolwork, and nearly half say they are online almost constantly, roughly twice the share reported a decade ago.
Brain rot: the perceived mental decline and shortened attention span caused by spending too much time consuming low-quality, repetitive digital content.
We gave a generation some of the most persuasive technology ever created without building the safeguards, public understanding, or institutions needed to help them navigate it. Social media has already reshaped childhood and adolescence. Generative AI is raising the stakes for attention, learning, judgment, and human agency.
Fair fight: “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks.”Jeff Hammerbacher
Meta whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams says company targeted ads at teens based on their ‘emotional state’TechCrunch, April 9, 2025
On a bus ride to work, psychologist Angela Duckworth watched a toddler, still young enough for a stroller, wail when his mother took back the phone he had been scrolling TikTok on. The only pause came when the bus crossed a bridge and he looked out at the river. “Was it one second or two? I can’t be sure. Not long enough.” Read her postAngela Duckworth, LinkedIn
We are building a public-health response that is neither anti-technology nor rooted in moral panic. We want young people to understand how these products affect them, regain control of their attention, and use technology on their own terms.
Protecting attention is the public health reform issue of our time. We need an institutional and systems-level response to protecting attention. Meta was sued by the states for intentionally designing Facebook and Instagram with addictive features that harm children's mental health, and for misleading the public about those risks.
$16,680,000,000
We should use this money to stand up a national prevention and education institution.
With clear goals, independent evaluations, transparent funding, and evidence that its programs produce measurable improvements.
Join thousands of young voices in demanding this settlement money is spent on what the fight was about and leads to real change.
Supporters
“What impresses me about Josh Jacobs and the young people behind the Attention Initiative is that they aren’t simply demanding action. They’ve done their homework, looked at what worked before and put forward a thoughtful, strategic solution for how we can make a lasting difference. We should listen to them.”
Read full statement
Nearly 30 years ago, we faced another industry whose products were addictive and harming a generation of young people. The tobacco settlement gave us a once-in-a-generation opportunity to do more than hold an industry accountable. We learned an important lesson: accountability for past harm is only half the job. You also have to prevent the next generation from suffering the same fate. We invested a portion of those resources in a national, independent effort dedicated to doing just that. It worked.
Today, we have another once-in-a-generation opportunity. States should come together and pool a meaningful portion of these resources to build a national, independent effort with the scale, expertise and staying power to protect young people from harmful and addictive patterns of social media use and help those already struggling to overcome them. By acting together, states can turn individual settlements into a national force for prevention, education and behavior change.
What impresses me about Josh Jacobs and the young people behind the Attention Initiative is that they aren’t simply demanding action. They’ve done their homework, looked at what worked before and put forward a thoughtful, strategic solution for how we can make a lasting difference. We should listen to them.
The lesson from tobacco is simple: settlements come and go, but when you invest wisely in prevention, education and behavior change, you can change the trajectory of a generation.
“Young people deserve more than warnings about the things that can harm them. They deserve the facts, tools and support to make informed choices, avoid addiction in the first place and overcome it when they need help.”
Read full statement
Young people deserve more than warnings about the things that can harm them. They deserve the facts, tools and support to make informed choices, avoid addiction in the first place and overcome it when they need help.
We know behavior can change at scale. For more than 25 years, Truth Initiative has combined science, education, culture and youth engagement to change attitudes and behaviors around tobacco and nicotine, helping drive youth smoking from 23% to under 2% and youth e-cigarette use to its lowest level in a decade, while helping millions on their journey to quit.
The challenge before us is different, but the opportunity is familiar: put young people at the center, give them the facts, tools and support they need, and apply the best of behavioral science and public health to empower healthier choices and help break the cycle of addiction. We have seen what is possible when young people are informed, engaged and empowered, and we have an opportunity to put that experience to work for a new generation.
What people are saying
Remember kids: once you make enough money, consequences don’t matter
Meta’s core business is showing ads to my Grandma
"They are not evil", but they are making theses apps so addictive that you will literally neglect your newborn child in order to get your dopamine hit.
Hopefully some day "social media" and/or short-form content scrolling addiction is addressed and treated as such.
I belive short form video content is the most dangerous piece of tech going to effect humanity in the long run , more than AI
Lets be real. If meta dies, it’s probably better for the world
That settlement is a joke! 18 billion instead of 1.4 trillion!