From Platform Design to Attention Governance: Rethinking Social Media Externalities

Abstract Social media platforms have become central infrastructures through which information is produced, distributed, and contested in contemporary societies, with growing consequences for organizations, social interactions, and democracy. Yet, management and organization scholars tend to treat social media platforms as contexts rather than focal organizational entities. Synthesizing a Point Counterpoint debate, we argue that key disagreements across the debate articles can best be understood as a question of attention governance – who controls attention allocation, by what rules, and with what accountability. We show that despite divergent causal diagnoses (political capture, incentive distortion, or structural constraints), the contributions converge on attention considerations as a key factor through which social media externalities are produced. We synthesize the debate views through three unifying threads: an interest in how attention is valued and accumulated as currency and infrastructure, the recognition of a gradual shift of rule decision‐making from collectively negotiated to algorithmically determined, and the reliance on increasingly thinner decision rules. We conclude with a governance research agenda to advance theory on social media platform externalities.