The Feed Effect: How Your Online World is Built for You, a campaign by NAMLE’s Youth Advisory Council
I’m not sure if you were keeping up last summer, but the world’s biggest sporting event, the FIFA World Cup, took place, with many games hosted on American soil. And during this time, my entire feed was filled with clips of soccer, from saves by Cape Verde’s goalkeeper to Ferran Torres’ winning goal for Spain.
But I remember a time before the tournament began, when not a single piece of media on my For You page had anything to do with the sport. It’s chilling how the switch is so sudden, especially when I’m more of a lurker when it comes to social media interactions. Yet, I didn’t just wake up one day mid-tournament liking videos. All I did was pause a little longer on some Ronaldo penalty highlights instead of scrolling past. Maybe I opened the comments and rewatched it once or twice.
It all Comes Down to Participation
You may have heard of active vs passive participation. If you haven’t, that’s okay! Active participation includes visible actions like sharing, commenting, or liking a piece of content. These are common actions people usually associate with online participation. However, there is also a channel for passive participation. This usually includes watch time, rewatches, scroll speed, and any pauses.
In reality, a lot of the valuable information social media platforms obtain comes from passive participation. Even though these actions may not feel like participation, they reveal what captures your attention to the algorithm. Additionally, passive participation is often a more honest reflection of our interests. People don’t always like or comment on the content they enjoy, but they almost always spend more time looking at it. As a result, platforms use these subtle signals to personalize what appears on your feed.
If you want the numbers, look at Jakob Nielsen’s 90-9-1 rule offers one way to think about participation inequality in online communities. The idea is that 90% of users are lurkers who mainly consume content without contributing, another 9% contribute occasionally by liking, commenting, and sharing, while just 1% of users generate the majority of the content you see.
There’s a good chance that if you’ve never posted a TikTok, rarely comment on Instagram, and mainly scroll through your feed, you’re in the overwhelming majority. And as we said before, you aren’t invisible.
Just because you are a bystander doesn’t mean your habits are not being fed into the algorithm. The 90-9-1 rule reveals an interesting imbalance. A tiny fraction creates most of the content, and the silent majority often shapes what spreads.
How Does Your Feed Actually Change?
As we saw with the World Cup and my feed, it’s not a sudden change. It’s more like a continuous feedback loop. Every time you interact with content, you provide the platform with information about what captures your attention. It can then use these signals to predict what you will engage with next and adjust what you see accordingly.
The entire process is pretty simple, and it functions like a type of feedback loop. You engage with a piece of content, the platform shows you more similar content, you see it more, and you engage with it more again. The cycle will keep repeating, and over time, several tiny interactions will reshape your feed, causing it to change over time.
Importantly, as we discussed earlier, passive behavior still affects your algorithm, so even if you lurk, you are still in a feedback loop. So, what may actually have seemed like a sudden shift is the result of many signals accumulating over time.
What YOU Can Do
Once you understand the gist of what’s going on, you may think you’ve become a more careful user. Well, not necessarily. A 2025 study of U.S. young adults found a surprising pattern: people with greater knowledge and awareness of algorithms were more concerned about misinformation, but were also less likely to correct misinformation or engage with opposing viewpoints. Researchers described this as a form of algorithmic cynicism, where users understand that algorithms influence what they see but are so skeptical of the system that they feel their actions have no effect. So, once you know your feed is personalized, you can’t just sit back. You must find a way to take action.
Platforms do give some control to their users. You can tell an app you aren’t interested in a particular post, or adjust what you see. These tools are a good starting point, but shouldn’t be treated as a complete solution.
Change Your Behaviors
The bigger influence is your everyday habits and behavior. If you repeatedly skip a specific type of content and spend 30 seconds watching another, you’re still sending the algorithm a message. Instead of focusing only on settings and menus, pay attention to the loop itself.
You now know the loop exists. So my advice to break out of it is to seek something outside your usual interests. Consistently dive into credible, diverse perspectives you wouldn’t normally hear from. Spend time with content that doesn’t immediately grab your attention. You don’t need to force yourself to like something or abandon your interests, but make sure you’re active in shaping your feed.
These actions may seem small, but that is the point. Just as small behaviors shape your current feed, small actions can get you out. You don’t have to defeat the algorithm. You just need to give it different signals.
How this Affects the Youth
All of this matters especially for young people, because we spend a lot of our time on social media. Our interests, beliefs, and worldviews are developing, so the content we encounter can play a big role in introducing us to new ideas and shaping how we think. That’s why consistently engaging with diverse perspectives and people from different backgrounds matters.
The World Cup on my feed was a harmless example, but the same loop applies to bigger, more serious topics like politics and health. I never meant to train my feed, and that’s why the goal isn’t to fear the algorithm or obsess over settings, but to be intentional with our behavior. Seeking out unfamiliar topics and worldviews gives the algorithm different signals and can gradually change what we see. The same small actions that trained our feed in the first place can help retrain it. The same small actions that trained our feed in the first place can help retrain it.
This blog was written by NAMLE Youth Advisory Council member Pranav Karthikeyan, as part of the campaign, “The Feed Effect: How Your Online World is Built for You“