The Right to Your Feed
I don’t need to bore you with stats, but here’s one that’s hard to ignore: since 2011, the share of teen girls reporting persistent sadness has jumped from 36% to 57%, while suicide rates for kids aged 10 - 14 have tripled. If you have a pulse, you’re on social media, and you’ve probably experienced a version of this—the quiet drag of feeds, reels, images, all vying for attention. You know half of it is rage-bait, but you can’t look away. That personal drag scales up to millions of people, shaping elections, relationships, and mental health.
Our entire world is on a collision course, all because of the algorithmic feed, but it doesn’t have to be this way. There’s a solution in sight, and it involves giving users back control of their information diet.
How did we get here?
Early social media was about connecting. Platforms like Facebook were private first and required users to add each other as connections. Use cases centered on sharing photos and posting on a guestbook-like feature called a wall. As platforms evolved, they started to center around a metric called engagement. How can they maximize interactions with a user? This metric led to the creation of a newsfeed, where content would now be shared not just from your connections, but from anyone within the platform. Users had very little control and were shown content that an algorithm believed would maximize engagement from that user.
As smartphones evolved, their cameras got substantially better. Around 2015, smartphone cameras surpassed a certain threshold in terms of video quality. This gave way to platforms like Vine, ByteDance, and eventually TikTok. They settled on short-form videos, just short enough that users wouldn’t get bogged down by the low production quality. There’s so much information in a video for a human that it’s addicting. Armed with a constant stream of videos, the new platforms elevated the feed concept to a new level. Users could swipe through videos for seconds; it was almost Pavlovian. With all this data and scale, the platforms invented an even more addictive version of the newsfeed, one that could be tuned in near real-time. Everyone copied this.
Deleterious Effects
Short-form content appeals to our pathos. Fifteen seconds isn’t enough time to logically digest something, but more than enough time for our lizard brain to feel emotions. A majority of media content is now algorithmically sorted according to what will enrage or tribalize the largest number of people. It doesn’t take a PhD in psychology to see that this is harmful.
Sensible Regulation
I’m a stalwart of freedom of speech, and I’m not in favor of censorship as a solution to this conundrum. Another solution would be abstinence, but I think the opportunity has passed. We’ve reached a point where being off social media and the internet would cause a significant disadvantage.
I think the answer lies in giving people back their agency. As I swipe through Instagram reels tonight, I have no control over what’s shown. Behind the scenes, Instagram has a vast catalog of what it thinks I like. We need to return control to users.
I propose a simple regulation for any platform with more than 1 million daily active users, built on three basic rights:
- Turn it off: You can disable algorithmic recommendations entirely
- See inside: You have the right to understand why something appears in your feed
- Tune it yourself: You control the levers, not just the platform.
Just like nutrition labels on food, you should be able to make smart decisions about what’s going into your information diet. The feed shouldn’t own you. You should own the feed.