Algorithms and brain chemistry keep us stuck in loops until we get saturated with digital garbage

There is a long-brewing malaise that has accelerated sharply since 2024. Scholars call it media fatigue, information overload, or data smog. We are increasingly repelled by the miasma of recycled digital sludge swirling around us. That is the good news – sort of. The bad news is that many cannot see a way out. We cannot “think outside the box” because the box has become us.

Media fatigue and news avoidance

Media fatigue predates the internet and is the result of psychological exhaustion from relentless streams of news, posts, and alerts. The web, however, supercharged this phenomenon, accelerating patterns observed by a weary colleague decades ago: “There is nothing new in news anymore.”

Fatigue inevitably leads to avoidance. A Reuters Institute study found that in 2023, 39% of people surveyed worldwide generally avoided the news, up from 29% in 2017. In the UK, two in five people say they feel “worn out” by it.

News p articipation is also falling. Between 2015 and 2022, global surveys show a 20-30% drop in activities like sharing, commenting, and discussing news. Comment sections, once messy but vibrant, have in many cases collapsed into mindless recriminations, devoid of gravitas or insight. This is partly due to another factor, as the next section illustrates.

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Ensconced trolls

Trolls come in many breeds: the insecure, the self-validating, the ideologue, and the hired gun. Some are simply paid to sink the conversation – to smear the source, derail the thread, and leave nothing but wreckage in the comments box. Overall, they are akin to relentless parasites seeking one host after another.

Recently, after weeks of hesitation, I finally published an article challenging the false equivalence between Palestine and Kashmir, and questioning why Israel panics over Iran’s phantom nukes while ignoring Pakistan’s 170-180 real ones.

The comments section soon became a battlefield. A Pakistani commenter unleashed a semi-literate barrage cataloguing India’s “war crimes” in Kashmir. I deleted the first two comments. Then came the pro-Zionist troll, slinging nonsense accusations. Oddly, neither turned on the other, despite their otherwise inimical religious and geopolitical ideologies. (You can see the screenshot here ).

That is the troll MO: drive out the thoughtful, drain the oxygen, and dumb down the public square. They don’t just kill conversation, they shrink attention spans and fertilize the soil for fake news to grow faster and fouler.

From fake news to phonier news

With a shorter attention span, younger generations, especially Gen Z, are jettisoning traditional news outlets for short-form content on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. The cure has its own poison.

Case in point: I recently searched YouTube for “Burkina Faso, aircraft” to gauge the pace of the revitalized nation’s infrastructural development. The top results?

Traoré Shocks the World as He Unveils First Ever African ‘MADE IN BURKINA’ AirPlane
Aviation News: Burkina Faso Builds and Launches Its Own Aircraft!

To be clear, these videos, and others like them about “Burkina Faso’s first domestically-produced plane,” bear the obvious markings of phony “news coverage” – both the scripts and the voices are AI-generated, and all the images used are archive footage, without any sign of the “indigenous aircraft” in sight. Even this should be enough to alert a casual viewer, who will not take the time and make the effort to check other sources.

Those who do would find that the entire story is fake – Burkina Faso has not, in fact, begun producing airplanes domestically. The closest news of the sort comes from last year, when the country restarted its national airline and acquired a new plane to bring its total fleet to four.

Yet, these and other videos about Burkina Faso’s supposed home-made plane together have garnered hundreds of thousands of views, thousands of likes and hundreds of adoring, unquestioning comments.

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Are we this naive?

Have people marinated in misinformation for so long that they cannot function without jumping from the kettle of fake news into the frying pan of even phonier news? Is this a kind of mental withdrawal that requires a steady fix of digital dung to maintain a false sense of comfort?

Even animals that consume feces – pigs, elephants, tapirs, warthogs — do so for nutritional benefit in circumstances of scarcity. In contrast, humans seem happy to consume intellectual waste for no benefit at all.

Not only has Burkina Faso not built an aircraft that “shocked Boeing, Airbus and the world,” even if seven of the top eight YouTube results claimed otherwise – only two nations have ever developed a fully independent aerospace ecosystem: the United States and the Soviet Union (and lately Russia). Even China’s most advanced fighter jets still rely on modified Russian engines even as rapid progress is being made on domestic alternatives.

Causes of gullibility

The brain finds safety in repetition because familiar patterns demand less mental effort and carry no uncertainty. This lowers vigilance, and each repetition reinforces neural pathways, delivering a small, reliable dopamine drip. Comfort beats novelty every time.

Platforms exploit this with algorithms that feed familiar material, locking users into a “repetition comfort loop” where predictability trumps reality checks. This can lead to zombie scrolling where one loops through the same or similar content without seeking anything new. Doomscrolling, at least, hunts for fresh disasters, much like a risk consultant is hooked on threat analysis.

Perhaps the truly curious have already abandoned YouTube and similar platforms as serious news sources. They retreat to trusted, bookmarked outlets – many now buried under algorithmic slime – leaving newcomers adrift in a clickbait ocean. If so, the digital divide will widen further. And that is bad news for the next generation.

Rebellion or saturation?

Global media consumption has risen for decades, but analysts predict the first decline in 2025 . Maybe we are finally hitting saturation. Maybe some are quietly rebelling, worn down by cognitive overload. Overexposure makes us skim instead of think, and chase the sensational over the substantive. And right now, garbage is winning the war for attention

Hooked on the blue glow? Switch it off. Walk in the dark. Let your brain detox from the loop – because in a dumbed-down world, the most rebellious act is to think.

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