You know the news is bad. You keep scrolling.
Literal meaning: Doomscrolling describes the compulsive consumption of negative, distressing, or anxiety-inducing news and content through continuous scrolling — particularly on social media and news platforms. The user typically knows the content is harmful to their mental state and continues anyway.
Origin: The term circulated in tech and media discourse from around 2018 — Twitter user Ashik Siddique’s post on 8 October 2018 (“thank u for breaking the spell of my doom-scrolling down my feed”) is among the earliest documented public uses — and gained widespread use during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, when a convergence of crisis news, lockdown conditions, and increased smartphone use produced documented increases in compulsive news consumption. Merriam-Webster added it to the dictionary in 2020. The behaviour predates the term — but the term named something people immediately recognised. Journalist Alex Wright traces the same pattern back to the nineteenth-century press: Dickens denounced the American papers of 1842 as a “monster of depravity,” and Thoreau, by 1854, already found the news “indispensable.” Each surge in publishing technology — the steam press, cheap paper, urbanisation — produced a glut of information that outran readers’ capacity to process it, and each glut was eventually absorbed by new gatekeepers (Pulitzer and Hearst then, recommender algorithms and AI now). Doomscrolling, in this reading, is not a new pathology but the current phase of a recurring cycle.
Compulsive consumption of negative news despite awareness of its psychological cost — a behaviour that platform design makes easier than stopping.
The Appeal: Doomscrolling is not irrational. During crises, staying informed is genuinely important. The drive to monitor threatening situations is a feature of human threat-detection systems — keeping watch is adaptive behaviour, and the platform delivers an endless supply of things to watch. The anxiety is appropriate to the situation; the compulsion is appropriate to the design.
The Friction: Recommender Systems — algorithms that determine what you see — optimise for engagement, and negative content generates more engagement than neutral content. The feed is not a neutral information source: it is an engagement-optimised environment in which distressing content is structurally amplified. Dopamine Feedback Loops — variable reward schedules — make the next scroll feel necessary: maybe the next item will resolve the anxiety rather than extend it. It rarely does. Cognitive Surrender is the downstream effect: the capacity for self-interruption weakens with sustained use. Technostress is the documented clinical outcome.
Why This Matters: Doomscrolling makes visible the gap between a behaviour and its cause. The scrolling feels like a personal failure of self-control. The design is what makes stopping harder than continuing.
Related terms: Recommender Systems · Dopamine Feedback Loops · Cognitive Surrender · Technostress · JOMO · Attention Economy · Brain Rot · Digital Detox
Read more:
- Doomscrolling During COVID-19 — Price, M., Legrand, A. C., Brier, Z. M. F., van Stolk-Cooke, K., Peck, K., Dodds, P. S., Danforth, C. M., Adams, Z. W. (2022). Psychol Trauma
- Digital Newsreport 2022 — Reuters Institute Digital News Report (2022)
- A Prehistory of Doomscrolling — Wright, A. (2025)
- @ahSHEEK — Siddique, A. (8 October 2018), early documented use of “doomscrolling”