Geoffrey Branger 6:25 am September 28, 2022 modified at 11:09 am September 28, 2022
Maya is a 13-year-old schoolgirl, she spends several hours a day on social networks and, despite her young age, realizes that sometimes she sees fear. “When I watch videos or pictures on Twitter about the war in Ukraine or ecology, it scares me a bit.” She is not the only one in this situation, more than 20% of college and high school students suffer from this unlimited consumption of negative information.
Sabine Duflo, psychologist, specialist in digital technologies and their impact on youth, explains that it is partly because of how social networks work: “The teenager who goes on social networks and practices ‘doom scrolling’ looks for strong feelings, with violent ones , moving, spectacular content. But in reality it is the algorithms of the applications that are responsible for this. The more we consume this type of content, the more we’re going to have in our feed, it’s a vicious circle.” She adds, “It’s all done in such a way that it’s a lot harder to stop than it is to keep looking.”
Doomscrolling can lead to depression
According to recent studies, doomscrolling can lead to several mental disorders in adolescents, increased stress, anxiety or even insomnia, and in rarer cases even lead to depression. This practice relates to the fear of missing out on what is happening online and causes anxiety in young people.
But beware, Doomscrolling doesn’t create problems: it amplifies them, as a psychologist and specialist in digital practices explains. “Someone who is anxious will try to regain control of the information and will suddenly seek all the more information to calm down, the problem is that it has an opposite effect that will regenerate the fear but the fear was there before”, details Vanessa Lalo.
Three out of four teenagers use social media as soon as they wake up
In particular, most experts denounce that middle and high school students are overly dependent on their phones. Today, three out of four teenagers go on social media as soon as they wake up and almost mechanically, without realizing it, scroll through pictures and videos on their phone (45% for all French people).