Political Consumerism in the Attention Economy Across Six Countries

Social media platforms (SMPs) such as Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok are increasingly scrutinized for employing attention-extractive algorithms to maximize users’ time on the platform. This study draws on the concept of political consumerism to explore how users protest against SMPs by strategically withdrawing or applying their attention for ethical reasons. Results of a pre- registered survey (n= 5,685) across six countries (Brazil, Germany, Japan, South Korea, the UK, and the US) suggest that negative attitudes towards AI-based recommender systems and distrust in social media companies are most strongly associated with algorithmic resistance. A comparative analysis further reveals that users from Brazil are least likely to disengage from SMPs on ethical grounds. The paper also presents a natural experiment investigating political consumerism towards Twitter/X and the open source alternative Mastodon before and after Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter/X. The results show that this event induced no immediate shifts in user behavior.