By Lake DiStefano
Opinions Editor
It’s a common scene: you’re back from a long day of either school or work, and you just want to scroll mindlessly after having to think all day. You’re excited to just turn off your brain and lose yourself to the tides of endless, yet ultimately mindless, 30-second clips.
While not always an avid scroller, there are days where I too wish to escape the mundane via such apps. Instagram and TikTok are typically my vices of choice in this regard, and I often enjoy how low stakes the content really is.
I like my social media to be as immaterial and superficial as possible. However, recently, this ritual of induced ignorance has not been as successful. The other day, I started to really take note of a particular bad habit within my algorithm.
Rage bait, posts designed to anger a user with intentionally negative opinions, is common on all social media platforms. It’s a fixture of the algorithm no matter what, as engagement farming is inherently the point from a creator’s perspective. I don’t mind those kinds of posts usually, and I tend to scroll past whatever insane take that graces my screen.
That was until recently when I made the apparently fatal mistake of lingering on one such post.
Admittedly, the post had struck a nerve with its stupidity of choice, and I had spent a few extra seconds debating the rhetoric in my head, before eventually remembering the pointlessness of it and scrolling away.
A few extra seconds. That’s all it took for suddenly every video thereafter to be replicas of that particular brand of poor opinion. No matter how fast I scrolled through, they just kept coming.
Now, like any normal person, I simply pressed the button built into the platform to indicate a lack of interest towards the videos. This feature is clearly advertised as a way to curate one’s feed more manually when presented with content they do not wish to interact with.
Except, no matter how many times I press the “not interested" or “reset feed” buttons, my algorithm consistently feeds me that which I do not wish to see. My social media was suddenly and seemingly built to bait.
Now, this is bound to be able to happen, given the nature of how the algorithm tracks engagement time to determine what content to show the user. I acknowledge that.
However, while I’m not cynical enough to outright suggest rage bait is intentionally fed for the sake of retaining engagement time, I am suggesting that whatever features currently exist to filter what content you see are extremely insufficient.
I suffer this problem on both TikTok and Instagram, with seemingly no reprieve no matter which I chose to entertain myself with. Furthermore, as previously stated, the built-in features didn’t help at all.
Blocking isn’t effective either, as there are an infinite amount of accounts one would need to block to never get presented with a certain strain of rhetoric.
This content lingered in my feed for days after, with only time and consistent scrolling doing anything to reduce the frequency. Even then, every so often the algorithm would spit a rogue video out at me, as if it had remembered that one time I let myself get angry and hesitate.
The only solution I’ve found thus far has been to delete my account and start my algorithm over, with extra attention paid to make sure I don’t fall down such a rabbit hole again. Still, the discontent lingers.
Why is there no way to recover from the mistake of falling for rage bait? Is one’s algorithm doomed? Should they simply let a few seconds lapse?
Regardless, in times such as these where mental health is already fragile, it seems irresponsible to me that there isn’t a way to better detox one’s feed from content that they find uncomfortable.
For many like me, social media can be a much needed reprieve, and its content should be exactly as serious, or casual, as the user wants it to be.
