The Feed Effect: How Your Online World is Built for You, a campaign by NAMLE’s Youth Advisory Council
I have a very complicated relationship with the phrase “just five minutes.” I’ll open TikTok while waiting for my coffee to brew, fully intending to maybe only watch three or four videos. Then I look up, and my coffee is cold. Instead, I somehow know the intimate details of a stranger’s breakup, and 45 minutes have passed.
It would be easy to blame this entirely on my lack of self-control. It seems like the obvious conclusion. Unfortunately for Silicon Valley, I have learned enough about algorithms to understand that some of the blame is shared with them, and I hope to share this understanding with you.
We tend to think of our feeds as a mirror. I like this video, so the algorithm gives me more videos to like. And to an extent, this is true. But the algorithm isn’t really asking, “What would make Anshi happy today?” or “What would Anshi like?” It’s asking something a lot closer to, “What will make Anshi stay here, keep clicking, watching, and engaging?”
Those are two very different questions.
Many social media platforms are built around engagement. So the algorithms are essentially paying attention to what will keep us around longer. Our activity gives them clues about what we’re interested in, so they can show us more of it. This creates a Sisyphean cycle and their predictions become incredibly fine-tuned. The problem is that attention and engagement aren’t necessarily the same as well-being.
Imagine you watch one skincare video because you’re breaking out. That’s very reasonable and maybe even productive. Then you watch another, and another, because your feed is never-ending. Suddenly, your phone has apparently concluded that skincare is your life’s calling. Now you’re watching ten-step routines, Hailey Bieber’s glass skin, and dermatologists rating people’s transformations, pointing out flaws that you didn’t even know were possible to have.
You opened the app annoyed about one pimple. However, you leave wondering whether your skin and skincare problems are the reason for all of the different problems in your life.
The algorithm has technically done its job. You kept watching.
For young people, that distinction matters enormously. According to Pew Research Center, 46% of American teens say they are online almost constantly. The U.S. Surgeon General has reported that teenagers spend an average of about 3.5 hours per day on social media, and adolescents who spend more than three hours per day on social media face nearly double the risk of experiencing mental health problems, including symptoms of depression and anxiety. In fact, 46% of adolescents surveyed also said social media makes them feel worse about their body image.
Of course, those statistics do not mean TikTok automatically causes depression after hour three. Social media has a lot of benefits. For example, it can provide community and spaces for self-expression. However, its effects really depend on the person.
For adolescents, however, we’re at a point where we’re figuring out who we are and what we believe. At the same time, features like recommended content and endless scrolling are shaping the information that we encounter. It feels like it’s making it harder for us to figure out how we compare to everyone else and where we fit in.
Young people themselves seem increasingly aware that something is off. In 2024, 48% of teens said social media had a mostly negative effect on people their age, a jump from just 32% in 2022.
In a utopian world, perhaps my conclusion would be a lot simpler. Everyone should delete social media, go outside, read a book, and live happily ever after.
But I’m also a young person, and I know that’s not going to happen.
Our friends are online. Our jokes are online. Most of our communities and large pieces of our social lives are online. “Just logging off” is not a particularly useful solution when so much of our lives happens there.
So maybe a more realistic starting point is understanding what is happening when we log on.
When a video makes me insecure, furious, or desperate to keep watching, I try to remember that my emotional reaction is manufactured by an algorithm that gains from it. Something appearing repeatedly on my feed does not necessarily mean it is important, true, or even good for me. Sometimes it just means that I kept looking.
So although we might not be able to turn off the algorithm, understanding what it is designed to prioritize gives us a lot more power to decide what we want, and when we want it.
This blog was written by NAMLE Youth Advisory Council member Anshi Bhatt, as part of the campaign, “The Feed Effect: How Your Online World is Built for You“