Doomsday scrolling is the habit of going through terrible news on various social media and other platforms, even if it's depressing and saddening. As this global pandemic keeps people locked up in their houses with almost nothing to do, surfing through the internet has become one of the most common activities. People indulge more and more in pandemic-related news by sacrificing their time, sleep, and, most importantly, their mental health.

The tendency of scrolling or endlessly surfing through bad news even if it's saddening or disheartening news, nowadays the moment we wake up, we end up checking and scrolling through our phones. This gaining momentum of excessive use and scrolling through your phone is doomsday scrolling or surfing.



How are we getting affected by doomsday scrolling?

People naturally tend to pay more attention to negative information, and social media's algorithm contributes to it by showing only those things that are our pique interest. With this, it becomes a never-ending Rabbit hole, and people get more and more invested in it. There are so many things going on at this time globally, starting with pandemics, deaths, protests over racial discrimination, wars, brutality, unemployment, and the list goes on and on.

It's only getting more intense, and the news never ends. These habits of scrolling through lousy news day and night trigger "mean world syndrome," a term coined in the 1970s by communication researcher George Gerbner which perceives people to believe that the world is more dangerous than it is due to overexposure to violent related content.

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