Is your social media experience out of your control?

Social media algorithms influence us in untold ways. What kind of effect is that having on our politics, our mental health and more? Here, Professor Casey Fiesler, an information scientist and technology ethicist who studies algorithms, sheds light on how to become more resistant to algorithmic influence—and why you should.

By Casey Fiesler

Do you ever feel like your social media experience is totally out of your control? Or perhaps you wish that your algorithm didn’t keep showing you a particular kind of content? We’ve all seen headlines about how social media can be harmful to our mental health—and this is true. But the truth is, social media can be bad for us and good for us. Taking greater control, and finding the right balance is one of the great challenges we face in our personal lives.

Social media has the potential to help us find connection and community, seek and share valuable information, and be exposed to ideas and voices we might not have heard otherwise. It can also contribute to the spread of misinformation, facilitate harassment, reinforce biases, violate our privacy, and lead us down negative rabbit holes.

Many of these negative aspects of social media we don’t have much control over. The business models of platforms (the more eyeballs on ads, the better) are often at odds with design features that might mitigate some of these problems. But the good news is, not everything about our social media experience is entirely outside of our control. In fact, with a more mindful focus on our usage habits, and a critical eye on the content that we are being served, social media algorithms can be a positive force as well as a negative one.

Recommendations and you

Do you ever think about why you see what you see when you’re scrolling? Your feed almost certainly looks very different than someone else’s, particularly on algorithmic feeds like TikTok or Instagram Reels. A couple of weeks ago I asked a friend if she’d made “the cucumber salad” yet, and she had no idea what I was talking about—but she spends as much time on TikTok as I do.

Your social media feed is essentially one big recommendation algorithm, specifically for you. It’s a “what does this person want to see?” prediction machine. And one of the best predictors of what you want to see is what you’ve watched and engaged with in the past.

Of course, the algorithm’s idea of “want” might be a little questionable. Did you really want to see that video that made you angry? Probably not. But you did watch it all the way through as you got angrier and angrier, and then you left a heated comment. To the algorithm, that’s just more engagement, and so surely you want to see more content just like that.

But this cycle is also how we can end up falling down negative rabbit holes of toxic content on social media. It can be very easy to watch and even engage with content that upsets us. We might not even realise we’re doing it.

Gaining control over your algorithm—what can you do to take back some control?

The next time you’re scrolling, try to be mindful about how the content you’re seeing makes you feel. If something is making you feel bad about yourself: scroll right past. Don’t engage. If it makes you smile: watch it all the way through, and give it a “like”. Not only are you helping to tell the algorithm what you want to see, but you’re also encouraging content creators to make more of that kind of content.

Of course, this isn’t about blocking out all the bad things in the world. We’ll sometimes see news or educational content that is upsetting or makes us angry—and we should. But finding more balance in our scrolling will ultimately be better for our wellness, to make sure we experience the parts of social media that make us feel good, too.

Sometimes when I start to feel that my social media scrolling is making me feel worse instead of better, I intentionally seek out content to help signal the algorithm to show me more of it. A quick search for “dogs” in TikTok helps ensure that for the next little while, my doomscrolling is interrupted by a cute dog.

You’ll need to figure out what kind of content would be positive for you. LG’s Optimism Your Feed campaign aims to bring a smile back to social media, so they’ve created playlists of uplifting content to retrain your algorithm. So the next time your scroll feels a little out of control, try to think about why you’re seeing what you’re seeing, and whether there are different signals you could send to the algorithm. If that fails, stopping scrolling—even if only for a while—can give you a much-needed reset.