Doomscrolling and the Death of Empathy

Almost everyone spends a portion of their day doomscrolling on social media. In 2020, over a billion people spent at least three hours a day swiping through their feeds, and a concerning majority of this time is spent absentmindedly. Users passively absorb the content which they are endlessly fed by their custom-tailored algorithms and, once it occurs to them to check the time in the top-left corner of their screen, the (average) three hours have already passed. 

Doomscrolling is a term that was popularized during the COVID-19 pandemic, and is used to describe "the masochistic practice of compulsively scouring the internet in search of ever more terrible information." It’s a familiar scenario: by force of habit, we flick the phone up and raise it to the vaguely transfixed eyes as the thumb navigates to the nearest app. We reach the digital sanctuary, release a sigh of relief as we are met with the familiar relentless torrent of information. The body is immobilized, save only for the thumb which steers our awareness in the only possible direction, swiping downward and away. And as we descend down the infinite scroll, we see get ready with me’s and a mother weeping over her child’s dead body and low-calorie, high-protein recipes and lynchings and thirst traps and genocide unfolding in real time. Occasionally, we allow ourselves to feel the outrage, despair, and grief, but those are quickly dispelled by the thumb’s renewed urge to swipe further down. 

While this behavior is not unique to the younger generations, Gen Z, and increasingly, Gen Alpha, are certainly trumping their elders. It is these age groups who lived their formative years in lockdown, their phones simultaneously acting as the “primary, and addictive, lifeline” for social connection and as the main source of the most salient news of police brutality, coronavirus conspiracies, and geopolitical tensions. It is also these age groups who then came out of lockdown into a historical cost of living crisis, threats of World War III, and AI undermining the existential concepts of creativity, time, and labor. It is therefore unsurprising that young people, in the very human search for certainty and control during times of uncertainty and chaos, obsessively scroll and hoard all information they come across. 

This self-destructive practice did not arise spontaneously, however. It’s the expected result of a set of social media design features that exploit users’ psychological vulnerabilities to maintain engagement. One notable element of the modern social media apparatus is short-form content – vertical, approximately minute-long videos overlaid with bold text and catchy sounds. Another crucial design feature is the infinite scroll, in which new material is continually added to the bottom of the page as the user swipes downward, leading to the ability to load new content forever. Ever since the global launch of TikTok in 2018 and its rapid propulsion into popularity, one cannot escape these two “dirty design” features. Meta copied TikTok’s blueprint in 2020, launching Instagram Reels, and in 2021, adding the function to Facebook. In the same year, Youtube tapped into the market and introduced YouTube Shorts. These updates have massively increased engagement on the apps – due to the integration of these features, TikTok is estimated to bring in $17 billion in profits in 2026, with Youtube making $46 billion and Meta, a staggering $50 billion.

Of course the lucrative inventions of Silicon Valley executives come at a human cost. An array of psychological research has dissected exactly how modern social media design keeps users engaged. An online feed that constantly reloads, manipulates and overwhelms the brain’s dopaminergic reward system. The uncertainty of scrolling is addictive. With each swipe, a small dose of dopamine is released in anticipation of the next video. The infinite scroll removes any friction that once existed on the internet, getting rid of the need for clicking, loading, or switching pages. Now, every barrier to consumption is removed, and consequently, the brain  treats the infinite scroll as an open loop that still needs finishing (which, by design, is impossible). And with almost all content lasting less than a minute, the whole process is expedited, denying the brain time to redirect attention. The modern social media layout has thus been likened to the “bottomless soup bowl” experiment, in which participants will keep mindlessly eating from a bowl of soup if it keeps refilling. 

This entire network of engagement traps is fuelled by social media algorithms. Seemingly automatic, cold, indifferent pieces of code, algorithms are nevertheless intimately intertwined with human emotion. They engage in a reciprocal correspondence with users, receiving their emotional responses to content in the form of engagement, and replying by pushing similar content onto their feeds. Users are captivated by this system, unable to resist generated streams of videos personalized exactly to their tastes and views. Tech executives, aware of this relationship, have gone on to exploit it. A series of reports by whistleblowers from companies including Meta and TikTok describe the “trade-off” they have made “between protecting people from harmful content and engagement.” Both corporations have instructed developers to allow more "borderline" shocking content – including misogyny, violence, and terrorism – in users’ feeds due to the outrage, and therefore engagement, it generates. This deliberate design takes advantage of young audiences’ emotional vulnerability and propensity to be gripped by political information. Ultimately, algorithms put the ‘doom’ in doomscrolling, promoting graphic, shocking, and polarizing content because of a desire to maximize shareholder value and in spite of users’ emotional wellbeing. At best, it is heedless; at worst, it is predatory.

In a media environment that is hypersaturated with emotionally exploitative content, people’s empathy gets depleted. One might think that bringing a painful reality closer – to the device that is always at our fingertips – would cause us to feel more. It would make sense, after all, if the more often we bore witness to catastrophe, the shorter it would make the distance between us and its victims. It is difficult to tell if this is the case.

The genocide committed by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza has been one of the most harrowing events of the 2020s. It is often labelled the “live-streamed genocide”: throughout its duration, people all over the world have become its viewers, observing entire families being wiped out, babies malnourished to death, and rows of bodies covered in tarps. Some Palestinians, including Motaz Azaiza, Bisan Owda, and Plestia Alaqad, have documented their personal experiences on social media platforms, chronicling their routine agony: forced displacement, missed meals, and homes turned to rubble. These digital diaries have introduced a new intimacy with death and destruction to social media users all over the world. Tragically, however, the channel Palestinians have used to communicate with the rest of the world, sabotages their message. On social media, the infinite torment of Palestinians is reduced to a page in an equally infinite catalogue of content, which users are addicted to mindlessly browsing. The whole design of modern social media is meant to make users become restless, bored, and scroll to the next video; not to stir up tangible action. The result is a society overstimulated to the point of desensitization, able to express only their helplessness and dejection.

Governments have begun to take advantage of the dulling effect that modern social media has on citizens’ emotions. Since the first months of his return to office, Trump has issued a rapid sequence of Executive Orders that have aimed to fundamentally restructure or dismantle parts of the federal government. His incessant blitz of executive action has modified tariff rates, dismantled Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs, deployed the National Guard to D.C. and Los Angeles, laid off federal workers, withdrawn the US from the WHO, established a brutal federal immigration agenda, etc. At the same time, Trump has produced a steady stream of absurd promises, ranging from suggesting the annexation of Greenland to declaring Canada the 51st state. This pattern of communication is part of a broader ‘flood the zone’ strategy, devised already in 2018 by Trump’s former advisor, Steve Bannon, who stated “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with sh*t." Bannon’s technique aims to exploit the limited bandwidth of the opposition, and to act faster than media attention cycles can react. This strategy has become even more relevant with the dissemination of short-form, algorithm-driven content, which has shrunk attention cycles out of existence. As a result, opponents of Trump are pulled into a vortex of daily reaction loops, attempting to fact-check, analyze, or condemn each new development. Instead of feeling indignant, they begin to feel exhausted.

Susan Sontag captured this sentiment perfectly. In her 2002 essay ‘Looking at war’, Sontag explores the ethical and emotional complexities of viewing images that depict suffering. Tracing the history of war photography, she posits that the Vietnam War constituted a turning point, transporting imagery of ruin and massacre to home television sets, forever turning it into a “routine ingredient of the ceaseless flow of domestic, small-screen entertainment.” Sontag argues that constant exposure to unfolding political events causes us “to feel that the sufferings and misfortunes are too vast, too irrevocable, too epic to be much changed, by any local, political intervention.” The result is that, after sustained contact with images of misery, the misery itself becomes increasingly distant and intangible, and the spectator less likely to have their conscience pricked. The tragedy lies in the fact that, within this media environment, “compassion can only flounder—and make abstract. But all politics, like all history, is concrete.”

Social media has often been viewed as an innovative tool for awareness and resistance, inspiring young activists and helping them coordinate protests. This dimension of social media should not be disregarded: it has allowed Gen Z to organize truly monumental acts of defiance. Nonetheless, these platforms are deliberately built in a way that blunts resistance, dampens emotion, and paralyzes the consumer. Algorithms, short-form content, and the infinite scroll create a web that ensnares users and desensitizes them to human suffering. Susan Sontag suggests that words, not images, foster deeper reflection – perhaps returning entirely to written narratives in traditional news outlets is the sensible choice. Others recommend going analogue and quitting the doomscrolling cycle, paradoxically implying that ignoring political crises will make us better equipped to respond to them. Some demand that governments step in to nip the problem at the bud, forcing social media corporations to adopt less psychologically exploitative designs. Ultimately, the modern challenge is to hold onto our empathy before it fades.

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