Purpose Mode browser extension helps social media users stay focused

Doom-scrolling, instinctively clicking on ad-based notifications or getting sucked into targeted content—all of these distractions can disrupt focus, increase screen time and ultimately make someone forget why they intended to log on to a social media app in the first place.

As it turns out, this is by design. Developers of social media applications thrive on user engagement by employing Attention Capture Damaging Patterns (ACDPs) such as infinite scroll, cluttered web pages, video autoplay and saturated colors. ACDPs prey on cognitive vulnerabilities to distract users.

“The attention economy is massive right now, and there’s a vested interest in pulling people’s attention in 100 different directions every time they’re online,” said Sauvik Das, assistant professor in Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII). “Most web design is centered on the idea of taking users’ attention away from what they were originally thinking about and redirecting it toward something else that is monetizable.”

Das and a team of Carnegie Mellon researchers led by HCII Ph.D. student Hank Lee wanted to get a sense of the effectiveness of these ACDPs in making users feel distracted. They conducted a field study where they enumerated different types of deceptive patterns that have been identified and taxonomized in previous research.

They then developed and distributed a questionnaire to research participants to understand how frequently they self-identified as feeling distracted when using social media platforms.

“Our participants reported feeling distracted about 28% of the time,” said Das. “So for more than a quarter of the time that people spend on these social media websites, they feel that their attention is being pulled away from what they actually want to do.”

To mitigate these distractions, the CMU research team developed Purpose Mode—a browser extension that allows users to toggle off ACDPs while using social media platforms.

The 29 participants who filled out the questionnaire spent the second week of the research study utilizing Purpose Mode as part of their normal browsing activities on X, Facebook, Linkedin, and YouTube.

As demonstrated in the video below, Purpose Mode gives users the flexibility to opt out of viewing ACDPs with a few clicks of a mouse button or trackpad. For example, Purpose Mode allows users to disable infinite scroll and replace it with a “show more” button that the user has to click to see more posts. It also gives users the opportunity to disable video autoplay and remove peripheral content on the sidebars of a social media platform home page.

After browsing social media sites and apps for a week using the Purpose Mode extension, the same users who previously reported feeling distracted 28% of the time reported feeling distracted 7% of the time while utilizing the tool.

The CMU research team will present its research findings on the open-source browser extension at this week’s Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2025).

The conference will take place in Yokohama, Japan from April 26 through May 1, bringing together researchers, practitioners and industry leaders to share their latest work and ideas and to foster collaboration and innovation in advancing digital technologies.

Das highlights the potential for future longitudinal studies to understand the long-term impact of Purpose Mode on users’ social media behavior, as well as the possibility of working with impacted communities, such as those with ADHD or other neurodivergent communities, to understand disparate impacts of ACDPs on users within these communities.

“Regulators can’t really do anything without data to support their claims,” said Das. “And right now, all of this data is very siloed and difficult to measure. So there are many ways we can move forward with this, including conducting broader measurement to support regulators.”