Written Testimony Before the U.S. Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, Innovation, and the Internet
In written and oral testimony to the Senate Commerce Committee's subcommittee on communications and technology, Tristan Harris — testifying as co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology alongside witnesses from Google, the AI Now Institute, and Wolfram Research — argued that 'persuasive technology,' design techniques drawn from behavioral psychology and studied at Stanford's Persuasive Technology Lab, has given a small number of platforms outsized influence over attention, beliefs, and social comparison. He described a competitive dynamic among platforms to capture progressively deeper layers of psychological engagement, from notification-driven habit loops to social-validation feedback through likes and follower counts, and associated these design patterns with strained mental health among teenagers. Harris urged Congress to treat this as a systemic design-incentive problem rather than a series of isolated content-moderation failures. TechKids Foundation includes this testimony as a primary policy-record document underlying this library's design-ethics citations.
Harris, Tristan. Written testimony submitted to the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, Innovation, and the Internet, for its hearing "Optimizing for Engagement: Understanding the Use of Persuasive Technology on Internet Platforms," June 25, 2019.