Artificial Intelligence and the Emotional Manipulation Economy
Keywords:
Affective Computing, Emotional Manipulation, AI Persuasion, Platform Governance, India Digital RegulationAbstract
Artificial intelligence has turned digital communication systems into behavioural ecosystems that predict, influence and commercialise human emotion. This paper examines what it terms the emotional manipulation economy: the commercial arrangement in which algorithmic recommendation, behavioural profiling, emotional analytics and persuasive design act upon autonomy and decision-making in digitally mediated environments. It argues that emotional response has become an extracted resource within platform capitalism, monetised through engagement maximisation, advertising targeting and behavioural prediction. The analysis traces the relationships between artificial intelligence, surveillance capitalism, emotional dependence and algorithmic amplification, and then examines the ethical and legal problems that emotionally manipulative technologies raise for mental privacy, informed consent, democratic participation, digital addiction and the commodification of emotional life. The method is doctrinal and analytical, drawing on law, behavioural psychology, political economy, media studies and technology ethics, with sustained attention to Indian regulatory practice. The paper finds that consent-based frameworks are structurally insufficient because they cannot reach the invisible behavioural manipulation embedded in algorithmic processes, and that accountability, transparency and enforceable mental privacy protections are required instead. It concludes that protecting emotional autonomy is a condition of democratic freedom in algorithmic societies.
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