Zombie scrolling? Photo: Photo by Rodion Kutsaev on Unsplash
The average smartphone user is scrolling through 300 feet of news feed a day, the height of the Statue of Liberty, Dr Jay Van Bavel, a professor of psychology and neural science at NYU says.
Five billion people around the world are on social media with the average user online for about three hours a day.
And the stuff that grabs our attention tends to be negative. Why? It's in the genes, Van Bavel told RNZ's Afternoons.
Feature interview: how to have a great time online
"Imagine you're one of our ancestors walking through the Serengeti, and out of the corner of your eye, you see something, and you're not sure if it's a snake or a stick, your first instinct is to just jump out of the way, because it was better to avoid being bitten by the snake and dying than it was to spend time to look and be careful and thoughtful about what it was.
"So, our default systems, our body is programmed to do is to avoid risks, avoid things that are dangerous and get out of the way. We're super-attuned to looking for those things and paying attention to them."
What was good for us back then is bad in the modern attention economy world we live in now, he said.
"We're stuck with these really old brains that can be manipulated and controlled."
However, he and his colleagues, in yet-to-be-published research, have discovered that people can be weaned off negative content on their feeds.
"We found that there were some accounts on social media, some individual influencers, who are pushing really divisive information, and when we got people to unfollow them, it made people happier.
"They were less polarised, and they had a better experience online. And what we found made people feel happiest online is when we replaced those influencers by having people follow like nature and science accounts."
Once the study was over, people kept following the more positive accounts, he said.
"I think that a lot of us are locked into following bad sources or bad influencers, but once you get people to stop following them and give them a better alternative, they actually find that they like it more."
Meanwhile, the tech barons are unlikely to change mega profit generating algorithms, he said.
"What these people care about is not what's in the best interest of society, it's just what's in the best interest of their own success or their own company's success, and you just lose complete faith in that as a system, the incentives for them are not right.
"Incentives for them are to make the maximum amount of money and to increase their shareholder value so they can hold on to their jobs."
Society also needs to flex its collective muscle to fix the problem, he said.
"I think that's ultimately what it's going to take. Companies will change, Brazil just did this to X, to Elon Musk's company. A judge there said, we're not going to let you be in Brazil unless you update your policies to do things that are in the best interest of the Brazilian society, and he refused to do it.
"And so, they shut down X in Brazil, the entire country. And eventually he caved."