Since to­days out­break of the Coro­na pan­dem­ic we can hard­ly es­cape bad news on so­cial me­dia. But why are we so at­tract­ed to them specif­i­cal­ly? And what can help us cope with it?

There will hard­ly be any so­cial me­dia users who don’t ex­pe­ri­ence this: You scroll and scroll and there’s no end to the bad news. New coro­na mu­tants here, ris­ing case num­bers there, and slug­gish vac­ci­na­tion num­bers across the coun­try. The prospects quick­ly seem any­thing but rosy, and yet we keep scrolling. We com­plain, and it even hap­pens to us quite of­ten, that we fall down deep, mor­bid rab­bit holes filled to the top with Coro­na con­tent. There we scroll and scroll un­til we feel phys­i­cal­ly un­well, end­ing any hope of a good night’s rest.

The ob­ses­sive con­sump­tion of bad news is not some­thing that has on­ly been known since the ad­vent of so­cial me­dia, but it is be­com­ing in­creas­ing­ly ap­par­ent and is be­ing ad­dressed far more fre­quent­ly in the me­dia. So when we find our­selves glued to our bright screens in the evening with tired eyes, we’re not on­ly scrolling to­ward our lack of sleep, but al­so to­ward doom.

But why is that? Our brain is op­ti­mized to process neg­a­tives bet­ter, faster and more in­ten­sive­ly. Evo­lu­tion is most­ly re­spon­si­ble for this, be­cause it has trained us to rec­og­nize dan­gers much faster and to act on them more quick­ly to en­sure our own ex­is­tence. At that time, a missed neg­a­tive mes­sage could po­ten­tial­ly be the last thing we per­ceive. Evo­lu­tion­ar­i­ly, our brains have not changed much since then.

If one trans­fers these pri­mal in­sights to the present time and the coro­na cri­sis, it be­comes ap­par­ent that we tend to con­sume neg­a­tiv­i­ty in or­der to be able to pro­tect our one and our so­cial en­vi­ron­ment from “ex­tinc­tion”. If this is com­mu­ni­cat­ed ad­di­tion­al­ly by the me­dia, a vi­cious cir­cle oc­curs, which our brain and our phys­i­cal ex­is­tence can­not interrupt.

How­ev­er, it is al­so the tech­ni­cal in­fra­struc­ture of the so­cial net­works them­selves that in­creas­es their pull. So­cial me­dia feeds are end­less: Once the bot­tom of the page is reached, the next posts load com­plete­ly au­to­mat­i­cal­ly. Twit­ter, Face­book, and the like stretch in­to in­fin­i­ty via in­fi­nite scroll. And any­one who has start­ed search­ing for a par­tic­u­lar top­ic or even just hap­pened to fol­low a link to a par­tic­u­lar top­ic will be re­li­ably sug­gest­ed more and more by the al­go­rithm. In this process, con­tent — un­like in news­pa­pers or on news sites — is not sort­ed ac­cord­ing to its rel­e­vance, but is en­tire­ly tai­lored to the user’s per­son­al click be­hav­ior. The same mech­a­nism al­so con­stant­ly pro­vides sup­port­ers of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries with the next re­as­sur­ance for their crude views in the timeline.

But why can’t we just close the apps? So­cial me­dia is de­signed to trig­ger the re­ward sys­tem in our brain. This en­cour­ages the con­sump­tion of bad news. Every time we see a new mes­sage, get a push no­ti­fi­ca­tion or a re­ac­tion to a post of ours, there is a short-term grat­i­fi­ca­tion ef­fect. In the long run, how­ev­er, the con­stant con­sump­tion of bad news is more of a bur­den for many peo­ple. Sleep dis­tur­bances, feel­ings of anx­i­ety and de­pres­sive symp­toms could be the re­sult of the per­ma­nent state of stress that sets in when peo­ple al­low them­selves to be bom­bard­ed by neg­a­tive head­lines for hours on end, day af­ter day.

In ad­di­tion, un­der the con­stant in­flu­ence of neg­a­tive news, a feel­ing of in­abil­i­ty to act can set in. This means that if we are on­ly ever shown what is go­ing bad­ly, with­out think­ing about how this state of af­fairs can be im­proved, we of­ten end up in a state of learned help­less­ness. Then we stop even try­ing to im­prove our situation.

So it is be­com­ing in­creas­ing­ly im­por­tant to be aware of one’s own us­age be­hav­ior and to cre­ate an aware­ness of what is so­cial­ly cor­rect — and what is not. Be­cause more and more sex­ist posts are show­ing up, where the peo­ple pro­duc­ing them mere­ly say that this is “nor­mal” to­day af­ter all. And last but not least, you can sort out your brain your­self by learn­ing the ever-in­creas­ing im­por­tance of so­cial rel­e­vance and vis­it­ing clas­sic news sites. In this way, you de­vel­op an ac­tive role in re­la­tion to the con­tent and don’t let the bad news pas­sive­ly hit you.