Social media content about illness and death

[MidnightPatrol]

I know that the social content we are fed is based on what you look at. I don’t click on these posts, or hover on them.

But so much of the content I am fed is people ill, children with cancer, suicides, pregnancy loss, death.

It feels like a wall of relentless negativity - and so much of it creates anxiety eg content around pregnancy loss, children losing their lives very young.

I know these are tragic features of life - but I don’t understand why the social media platforms are feeding me so much of this. It is disproportionate and anxiety-inducing - these aren’t people I follow, yet their content appears constantly in my feed.

I feel like this kind of content has really increased over the past 12 months or so. Has anyone else
noticed similar?

No. Mine is full of horses, dogs and Ibiza.

It'll be your algorithm. I clicked on a tweet once about the death of a young person as I thought it was about someone I knew, and then was besieged. Make a concerted effort not to engage with any of the content - don't click on it, follow links, look at pics etc. It'll go away and be replaced by something else soon enough.

No mine is full of crazy cats, sport and the Danish Royal Family!!

Cats and sport I get but where on earth does the Danish Royal Family come in!!

Mine is pretty much all adverts for cardigans. I wish I'd never bought that bloody cardigan.

I’m getting a lot of Indonesian content at the moment. I’m not Indonesian and have no intention of visiting any time soon.

No, not at all.

Mine's all Temu ads and online shoe shops.

Clear your cookies/history, that'll sort it.

Adverts on where? Some you can click and say not interested. Or, go to your Google adcontent page and change the settings to remove the relevant categories - the vast majority of ads usually come through Google.

If it's on Twitter/X then you can go into settings and exclude certain words and phrases. I barely use Twitter but I was getting 3 or 4 notifications a day from accounts owned by people with cancer. I didn't know these people, it felt like it came out of the blue. I changed my settings so they excluded the word cancer and chemotherapy, and that seems to have done the trick. I'm very sorry for those people, but I didn't follow them or any accounts like theirs.

I don't know if you can do this for Instagram and Facebook?

I had a TikTok account in 2020 and it was constant barrage of domestic abuse situations, people recounting their traumatic assaults, grieving videos, cheating videos, etc. I was endlessly blocking pages and clicking ‘not interested’, but apparently because you’re ‘interacting’ with the video or visiting their profiles to block them, the algorithm shows you more similar content!

For ages I opened the app and didn’t scroll, I would just search ‘cute cat videos’ ‘new season Dior’ ‘skincare’, but it didn’t help. I deleted the account and made a new one, no issues since and I don’t get any of that sort of content anymore.

No, I've never seen anything like that. Mine is all kittens, puppies, books, knitting and crochet content.

There is a way to turn off certain ad categories (on Facebook at least, not sure about the other platforms). I can't remember how to do it but I'm sure it'll come up if you google.

Facebook seems to think I am interested in videos about Indian people with physical deformities and Middle Eastern women in burkas!

I will have a look at this on twitter.

I agree - I feel very sorry for them but I don’t need to see daily updates about people that are dying. I don’t know them!

Before I gave up on Facebook, I was being fed a lot of royal family content too.