In a pocket of spare time, you may reach for your phone to scroll social media – but how often do you end up spending more time here than you planned?
You might beat yourself up for losing stretches of your day to scrolling, but your attention is being held by design, experts suggest – more so now than ever.
“It is not the social media of 2012. This is much more sophisticated,” Dr Kaitlyn Regehr, associate professor of digital humanities at UCL, tells Sky News.
And with short-form content now more prominent, the “infinite scroll” format is under the spotlight as one of social media’s most powerful weapons.
The government is currently carrying out a consultation on implementing an Australian-style social media ban for under-16s.
It is looking at options including restricting infinite scrolling, which it says “drives addictive or compulsive use”.
Sir Keir Starmer said children are being pulled into “a world of endless scrolling, anxiety and comparison”.
So how does the infinite scrolling feature play into this?
Dr Regehr tells Sky News that the feature is a way of keeping our attention for as long as possible.
“There’s this saying: ‘We are the product of social media.’ We’re not the consumers. We are the product, or rather our time and attention is the product, which is being sold to advertisers,” she says.
“When we talk about the infinite scroll, in part, we’re worried about… this idea of a kind of screen addiction, where we find that we can’t stop scrolling.
“The scrolling function often negates a lot of the good things that we think about when we think of the internet, which is about education, which is about collective knowledge. You’re not actively searching for things often. You’re not making intentional choices.”
Dr Regehr and Marine Tanguy, an entrepreneur and author who wrote The Visual Detox: How to Consume Media Without Letting It Consume You, tell Sky News they believe this could be particularly damaging for children.
“I think scrolling is so addictive and so anxiety-inducing, because you’re not feeling like you’re making any choice whatsoever,” Ms Tanguy says.
“And I think that all goes back to ownership and critical thinking – children need to feel they have agency.”
Many European nations are now considering bringing in under-16 bans of their own, and Ms Tanguy is not surprised.
“It’s because we’ve seen an entire generation being unable to focus and having more mental health issues, higher [levels of] burnout, higher fatigue,” she says.
“And we can link it all back to an over-exposure of content. So we’re trying to figure out how to avoid making that mistake again for the next generation.”
Experts are split on whether time on social media is inherently harmful.
That’s partly down to the fact that most research relies on overall screentime. But, as Dr Holly Bear, postdoctoral researcher in the department of psychiatry at the University of Oxford, puts it: “Time spent online alone is not a reliable indicator of risk.”
What’s a greater cause for concern among many people is the type of content favoured by algorithms and its impact on young people.
‘Brain rot’ and low-quality content
Ofcom research suggests children are increasingly using social media primarily to consume visual media, rather than to interact with others, and that much of it is short-form.
Dr Regehr says: “Generally, when we think about these feeds, we increasingly are seeing very low-quality, short-form content that is bad for young people’s attention span, that is bad for positive function.”
Ofcom’s research into children on social media has highlighted “brain rot” content as a growing trend which was causing negative feelings for young viewers.
Brain rot videos, a report from last year said, “can be described as frenetic, choppy, and loud and usually include contextless, random, non-sequitur clips that do not seem to make sense”.
But the term was also used by some children to describe the negative feeling they associated with the content, which they said left them feeling overstimulated and disoriented.
Ms Tanguy suggests you “can’t trust” such content, and that it is becoming harder to regulate it due to how easy it is to make using AI.
It is often associated with the sort of content you see after spending too long online.
“You can start with something that’s quite subtle. And then two hours later, you can land on something that visually is really problematic,” Ms Tanguy says.
She uses now famous examples of AI-generated brain rot characters like Bombardiro Crocodilo, a crocodile-headed military airplane.
The majority of videos are considered silly and absurd, but there was one clip of the character which sparked outrage for seemingly mocking the war in Gaza.
It’s a perceived lack of regulation which social media companies are widely criticised for.
“We’re really worried about the type of content they [children] are receiving on these relatively unregulated spaces,” Dr Regehr says. “This is not like turning on regulated television.”
How infinite scrolling can lead to doomscrolling
Dr Regehr has researched how social media recommendation systems such as the infinite scroll feature often put harmful content in front of young people, leading them to doomscroll.
Doomscrolling is spending an excessive amount of time consuming negative stories or posts on social media.
In the attention economy, “hate, harm, and disinformation often flourish”, Dr Regehr explains.
“Disinformation is often more attention-grabbing than truth, or a thing that hooks into our insecurities. Things that elicit emotive responses often hold us there just that little bit longer. And it’s that extra time, that extra attention that advertisers are paying for.”
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Dr Regehr points to the memoir of former Facebook employee Sarah Wynn-Williams, who claimed parent company Meta used algorithms to identify when teenagers were feeling vulnerable, so that they could target them for advertisers.
“So Sarah gave the example of, if you have a teenage girl who posts a picture of herself, it’s probably a great time to sell her weight loss product.”
Dr Regehr says the algorithm will also see it as a chance to “expand that vulnerability” through negative content and misinformation regarding weight, “because in that state of vulnerability, there is more potential to sell for more”.
Meta previously criticised the memoir and rejected Ms Wynn-Williams’ accusations.
Dr Regehr and Ms Tanguy both agree that these aspects of social media can be damaging for anyone, but particularly for young people, who are less mature and therefore more vulnerable.
Are we close to a social media ban?
A social media ban for under-16s could be introduced in the UK after the House of Lords backed the move.
Peers passed an amendment to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, a wide-ranging set of law proposals currently making its way through parliament.
The government will have the chance to overturn the amendment in the Commons, but experts say it could prove challenging, as many Labour MPs have backed the ban.
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The potential ban has split opinion among online safety campaigners, safety groups and children’s charities.
Some have written to MPs urging them to support the ban, while others have pushed for the opposite, saying they believe it would be “the wrong solution” and that efforts should instead be concentrated on enforcing the Online Safety Act.
France and Spain have pledged to bring in a similar ban, while Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Italy and Slovenia are also considering taking action.
