KT4D Social Risk Toolkit Module A: AI, free will and autonomy – Individuals' autonomy in their online choices

Navigating online environments involves a continuous stream of small decisions: whether to click, scroll, watch, share, ignore, or disengage. Individually, these choices appear trivial; cumulatively, they shape how attention is allocated, how time is spent, and how preferences and attitudes are reinforced. The sense of autonomy at stake in digital environments does not primarily concern spectacular acts of persuasion, but the ordinary ability to steer one’s actions in line with one’s intentions over time. This chapter examines autonomy as a form of agentive control grounded in attention regulation, goal-directed action, and reflexivity. It explores how algorithmic curation, interface design, and AI-driven personalisation structure the space of possible actions, sometimes facilitating choice and sometimes constraining it. Rather than treating autonomy as an all-or-nothing property, the analysis focuses on the conditions under which digital environments support or undermine individuals’ capacity to remain authors of their own online behaviour.