By F. Andrew Wolf, Jr.
We humans have created a new malaise for ourselves, and it has accelerated sharply over the last couple of years. Scholars call it media fatigue, information overload – “data smog.” But we are becoming increasingly repelled by the miasma of recycled digital “sludge” swirling around us. And that’s good news – sort of. The bad news is that many of us cannot see a way out. We cannot “think outside the box” because the box has become us.
Information Overload Brings Media Avoidance
Media fatigue actually predates the internet and is the result of psychological exhaustion brought on by relentless streams of news, posts, and alerts. The web merely supercharged this phenomenon, accelerating patterns observed just recently by a weary colleague of mine: “There is nothing new – in news anymore.”
Psychologists tell us that 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 – 40% – say they feel “worn out” by the news.
News participation is also declining. Between 2015 and 2022, global surveys showed a 20-30% reduction 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 – trolls.
Ensconced Trolls
Trolls on the web come in many forms: the insecure, the self-validating, the ideologue, and the “hired gun.” Some are simply people paid to collapse the conversation – to smear the source, derail the thread, and leave nothing but wreckage – debris – in the comments box. Analogously, they are akin to parasites seeking one host after another.
The modus operandi of the troll is simple: Drive out the thoughtful, exhaust the oxygen, and “dumb down” the public discourse. Their aim is not just to stop the conversation; they diminish attention and – one might say – prepare the ground for fake news to burgeon, all with a logic distinctly foreign to reasoned thought.
From Fake News to Something Worse
With a shorter attention span, younger generations, especially Gen Z, are jettisoning traditional news outlets for short-form content like TikTok, YouTube, Instagram. Unfortunately, the cure comes with its own poison.
In the early 2010s, Millennials helped usher in the rise of online media. They consumed news through digital-native sites like BuzzFeed, Vox, and Vice, while still engaging with legacy outlets on platforms like Facebook and Twitter (now X). Push notifications from the New York Times or CNN apps were common. RSS feeds weren’t dead just yet.
But Gen Z? They’re unlikely to even visit a news homepage.
According to a 2022 Reuters Institute report, over 39% of Gen Z respondents said they use social media as their primary news source, with platforms like TikTok and YouTube leading the way. Facebook barely registers. X is more polarizing than trusted. News apps? Mostly ignored. The reason is simple: Gen Z expects news to come to them, not the other way around.
But there is new research from the University of Virginia that explains some of the behavior of Gen Z, especially involving their assimilation of “news-information.”
It seems that Generation Z and Millennials, who grew up online, struggle to spot bogus, AI-generated headlines. Knowing what is real and what is fake is, for them, not easily discernible. Hudson Golino, an associate professor of psychology at UVA, joined colleagues from the University of Cambridge to create “MIST,” the misinformation susceptibility test. The team used ChatGPT2 to generate quizzes with both fake and real headlines revealing interesting data.
“We wanted to see the difference between younger adults and older adults in terms of their ability to detect misinformation,” Golino said. “We discovered something interesting…older adults are actually less vulnerable to misinformation than younger adults.”
“But in terms of believing or the capacity to differentiate fake news generated by AI and real news headlines, older adults are better than younger adults,” he said.
That’s because of something called “crystallized intelligence,” which is developed over one’s lifetime. Older people have more of it. Younger ones have less.
International research group YouGov used the MIST test in US polling. It found two-thirds of Americans can tell fake from real headlines. But only 11% of 18- to 29-year-olds earned a high score (over 16 headlines correct) and 36% received a low score (10 headlines or fewer correct). Of those 65 and older, 36% earned a high score, while only 9% received a low score.
The problem is that most younger people get their news from social media sites like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, that prioritize endless scrolling.
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 prevails over novelty.
Platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram 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,” which is where one loops through the same or similar content without seeking anything new. “Doomscrolling,” at least, hunts for fresh disasters.
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 their own algorithms for marketing – leaving newcomers adrift in a sea of clickbait. If so, the digital divide will widen further. And that is bad news for the generations to come.
Rebellion or Saturation?
Global media consumption has been on the rise for decades, but analysts now predict the first decline in 2025. Maybe we are finally hitting the saturation point. Maybe some are quietly rebelling, worn down by cognitive overload. Overexposure makes us skim instead of think – chase the sensational over the substantive. And right now, garbage is winning the war for shrinking attention spans.
Hooked on the blue glow? Switch it off. Let your brain detox from the loop – because in a dumbed-down world, the most rebellious act is to think.
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Andrew Wolf, Jr., is director of The Fulcrum Institute, an organization of scholars dedicated to the classical liberal tradition. He has also been published stateside in American Spectator, The Thinking Conservative, and American Thinker, as well as abroad in International Policy Digest, Times of Israel, and The Daily Philosophy, among others.
