• “Stop the Forced Feed” is a new campaign by non-profit Cybersmile in partnership with Havas SO, Conran Design Group, and Prose on Pixels, highlighting how social media algorithms serve harmful content without user consent.
• “Stop the Forced Feed” uses real food packaging and unprompted deliveries of black groceries to make the point that what we are fed online impacts our mental health in the same way as what we eat affects our physical condition.

Even though we choose to log in and consume digital content on social media, what we are served is mostly out of our control. Platforms like TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Meta’s Facebook and Instagram deliver content based on algorithms designed in part to keep us engaged. How those algorithms work is largely a closely guarded secret, and users have no control over them.

At issue is that what’s engaging isn’t necessarily good for us. You can think of it as the equivalent of junk food or bad reality TV. Oftentimes, the most salacious and enraging content is what keeps us scrolling, with posts promoting violence, hate, discrimination, misinformation, and propaganda often rising to the surface. They don’t call it doomscrolling for nothing.