Kantian Moral Evaluation of Persuasive Technology Designs (Research Paper Sample)

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Kantian Moral Evaluation of Persuasive Technology Designs
Introduction
Persuasive social media and gaming technologies are interactive technologies designed to change attitudes and behaviors without coercion or deception. Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook are excellent examples of social media sites that support online connections among users and use persuasive technologies significantly. For instance, Facebook uses different features to serve online users' personal and social desires. These apparent features include staying in touch, posting photos, making friends, socializing, and getting entertained. Ideally, Facebook and its clients seek to encourage the end-users or social media consumers to spend as extensive-time online as possible, including using the platform and watching ads.
Besides, Facebook users constantly make attempts to coerce, directly or indirectly, and to persuade fellow Facebook users to accept a specific narrative or version of reality, such as changing political opinions or adopting a particular view concerning topics such as the economy, environment, and social problems, including abortion and legal justice reforms. Meanwhile, games such as Candy Crush use persuasive technologies to persuade users to consume in-app goods at a fee. For instance, Candy Crush persuades users or gamers to spend money buying virtual goods that assure them the additional path to victory and complete milestones to access other game stages. Other games set ads as mandatory features or prerequisites before players can proceed to other stages or access virtual goods that enhance the gaming experience. However, these persuasive technologies can have undesirable consequences, employ problematic methods of persuasion, or persuade users to do things that cannot be morally justified. Nonetheless, the technique is morally questionable; it can be perceived as a threat to human autonomy, an agent of moral laziness and unproductive sedentary lifestyles, or an anti-democratic force dictating behaviors and attitudes of people through designers and influencers. The paper examines persuasive designs