“Doomscrolling” is defined as spending excessive time reading large quantities of news, particularly negative news, on social media. Doom scrolling came about with the rise of the mobile phone and social media in general during the 2000s and 2010s. However, the exact term came about in the 2020s, an era which I believe has been defined by Doomscrolling. Social media algorithms, which have had years to develop and grow accustomed to your personal tastes, are first and foremost designed to capture and keep your attention and feed you advertisements while it has your attention. Algorithms have become so good at keeping your attention that you can sometimes spend an hour or so just on social media alone, scrolling through hundreds of short videos and images before you finally snap out of it. Oftentimes, these hours of scrolling can very quickly become negative, and Algorithms may start feeding you harmful content to keep your attention.

This content can take many forms but often delves into specifically political content. Politics, in general, is negative, and combining this pre-existing negativity with the specially designed Algorithms of major social media companies is a recipe for the doomscrolling phenomenon. It can lead to mental health issues, physical health issues, and valuable time being wasted on scrolling social media feeds. Doomscrolling is the most prevalent issue among young Americans, especially members of Gen Z, as they are the first generation to grow up with mass social media use and the rise of smartphones. However, this doesn’t mean I think doomscrolling will end; it will likely get worse.

I believe the next Generation, Gen Alpha, will have the worst case of doomscrolling yet observed. Gen Alpha will be the first generation to grow with the rise of artificial intelligence and large language models like ChatGPT and DeepSeek. The use of AI to help “improve” social media algorithms is ever more of a reason to be concerned for the next Generation.