Public Media is Under Assault. Here's a Way to Fight Back
An article for The Boston Globe about how we can respond to the federal defunding of public media by putting an attention extraction tax on tech companies to support civic technology.
This article was written with Matt Victor and originally published in The Boston Globe’s Sunday Ideas section on 2025-06-29.
Americans desperately need a shared civic infrastructure. We can fund it with an attention extraction tax.
Matthew Victor and Nathan Sanders are the founders of the Massachusetts Platform for Legislative Engagement, an online platform for proposing and discussing legislation.
Federal lawmakers are defunding public media, accelerating the deterioration of civic institutions like NPR and PBS. In this void, however, lies an opportunity for states to take a leading role in rebuilding what is being lost.
Trusted public information systems are still vital, whether they are media literacy initiatives or internet-based platforms for civic engagement. Operating such resources at scale requires levels of funding that many states may not have — but that could change. State legislators should consider requiring wealthy Big Tech companies to contribute to the health of our democracy.
The principle is simple. Social media platforms have become the default venues for discussing politics and other civic matters, and yet they have proven miserably unfit for that role. And when companies extract value from and degrade public resources, they should pay a tax aimed at repairing the damage.
Maryland has already set a precedent. In 2021, it enacted the first state-level tax on digital advertising revenues, targeting tech giants like Meta and Google. The tax applies only to firms with more than $100 million in annual revenue and prohibits them from passing the cost onto consumers. The tax, which has survived constitutional challenges, is used to fund local news outlets.
This principle should be adopted by other states and expanded to account for the extraction of our attention and damage to our democracy. And the tax money can go not just to local news but to new online platforms that facilitate civic participation.
Between Facebook discontinuing its fact-checking program, systemic partisan algorithmic biases, and TikTok’s pro-China and pro-
And while social media provides an easy outlet for political expression, it rarely leads to meaningful change.
Given the time, effort, and discomfort required by alternative modes of civic engagement — attending public hearings in person, door-knocking for candidates — it’s understandable why many opt to post on social media instead. But relying on social media as our primary civic tool results in performative outrage and fractured relationships, rather than policy progress. Unless people see progress result from civic engagement, they will become frustrated, tune out, abdicate civic responsibilities, and lose faith in democracy itself.
That’s why a movement for “digital civic infrastructure” is emerging.
Across the world, governments and nongovernmental organizations are experimenting with new models of civic engagement. Taiwan’s Pol.is facilitates consensus-building deliberation, one of many tech-powered initiatives that have transformed Taiwan’s institutions and raised the government’s approval rating from 10 percent to 70 percent within a single decade. France’s MAKE.org enables mass civic participation; Spain’s Decidim.org powers community decision-making; and in various countries citizens’ assemblies are integrating such technologies to produce meaningful policy changes. In France, for example, a group of citizens debated assisted dying, and in Ireland, a citizens' assembly helped shape a constitutional amendment legalizing abortion.
In the United States, examples of promising online civic projects include CalMatters, Front Porch Forum, and Free Our Feeds.
These nonprofit initiatives emphasize compromise and shared reality over outrage and division, leading to demonstrable improvements in citizen engagement and policymaking.
However, a critical barrier remains: a significant lack of funding.
While railroads, radio, and television were once required to serve the public through common carrier laws, antitrust limitations, and public broadcasting systems, today’s tech industry does not face similar pressures. That could be fixed with an annually assessed “Attention Extraction Tax” on social media companies. It would directly fund the development of public-interest digital spaces, local journalism, and media literacy programs.
Public trust in Big Tech is low, and requiring these companies to pay their fair share to support democracy would likely resonate across ideological lines.
State legislatures must seize the opportunity to rebuild and modernize the infrastructure that Washington is tearing down. We can choose to make our democratic institutions more resilient, effective, and responsive to the needs of residents. And by making those who profit most from the current system contribute to its renovation, we can ensure that the burden does not fall on ordinary citizens.