Engagement Optimisation Harms

Definition

Engagement Optimisation Harms examines measuring harms created when engagement is treated as the primary optimisation objective within the broader domain of how platform design, incentives and governance shape user behaviour, attention, participation and migration.

Why this matters

Engagement Optimisation Harms can materially affect autonomy, safety, public trust, market integrity, community cohesion and institutional decisions. Poorly designed interventions can suppress legitimate speech, entrench bias or create false confidence.

Research questions

Under which conditions can measuring harms created when engagement is treated as the primary optimisation objective be measured or improved reliably, and how do effects vary by platform, population, context and intervention?

Hypotheses

A transparent, context-aware approach combining provenance, behavioural evidence and accountable human review will improve wellbeing, agency and participation quality more than single-score, content-only or opaque automated approaches.

Proposed methods

A/B and quasi-experimental analysis; interface audits; recommender-system testing; digital trace analysis; user diaries; natural experiments; platform policy comparison; expert review; affected-user interviews; reproducibility testing; methods adapted specifically to Engagement Optimisation Harms

Stakeholders and beneficiaries

platform users; product teams; trust and safety teams; behavioural scientists; educators; parents; advertisers; regulators; civil society