‘Doom scroll’ your way to misery in just minutes on social media

SPENDING just a few minutes “doomscrolling” through grim Covid news on social media is enough to leave us down in the dumps, research suggests.

Consuming bad news about the pandemic on Twitter or Youtube caused people’s positive moods to plummet in as little as two minutes, a study involving 299 participants showed.

Lead author of the research, Dr Kathryn Buchanan, of the University of Essex, said: “If even a mere few minutes of exposure to bad Covid-related news can result in immediate reductions to well-being, then extended and repeated exposure may over time add up to significant mental health consequences.

“Our findings suggest the importance of being mindful of one’s own news consumption, especially on social media.

“In some countries, news consumption via social media is on the rise, even though people acknowledge that news on these platforms has lower quality, accuracy, trustworthiness and impartiality.”

In the study, participants were asked to spend a few minutes consuming upsetting information about Covid, either by reading a real-time Twitter feed or watching a Youtube video. They reported lower well-being compared with a control group, which had not been exposed to any news about the pandemic.

In contrast, positive Covid stories about random acts of kindness did not have the same negative consequences, suggesting that it is not simply the time spent on social media that is the problem, but rather the content. A number of scientific studies have discovered that since the beginning of the pandemic, increased levels of anxiety and depression have been reported globally and that it is higher among those people who seek out and consume Covidrelated news each day.

But the new study shows just how quickly someone’s positive outlook can decline .

Half of adults in the UK now use social media to keep up with the news, including 16 per cent who use Twitter, and 35 per cent who use Facebook.

“People seek out social media for many reasons, other than news consumption, and may not realise that minimal exposure to bad news on these platforms can have such negative consequences,” added Dr Buchanan.

“One strategy that individuals could employ would be to attempt to undo the negative by balancing it out with positive information,” she added.

The research was published in the scientific journal

‘This shows the importance of being mindful of one’s own news consumption especially on social media’