Tag: mental-health

The Social Media Echo Chamber

When the Rabbit Hole Becomes an Information Silo

BILL ASTORE

APR 16, 2026

If you’ve spent time on social media, you know it can be quite unsocial. 

Profane, angry, hostile posts and comments can be dismissed for what they are. But what about more subtle threats to the free and civil exchange of ideas? Social media sites aren’t necessarily designed to encourage such exchanges. They’re not primarily designed to educate us, to challenge us to think critically, while promoting tolerance and an open mind. 

Instead, they are designed primarily to capture and command our attention, to keep us “on the app,” reading and clicking and doom-scrolling in an addictive way. Sites keep track of what we read, what we share, even what we pause over, and feed us more of the same. An information silo is created controlled by algorithms that feed you more of what you like, or more of what angers you or titillates you or otherwise occupies your attention and time.

It’s easy to end up in an echo chamber that confirms your biases, one that reinforces the idea that people who think differently from you must be willfully misguided or stubborn or maybe just plain stupid or even evil. If you already dislike or distrust “the other side,” social media will tend to make you dislike or distrust them even more.

We’re warned about going down the rabbit hole, but we’re not warned about the information silos being created for us without our knowledge or consent.

All this has been on my mind after I watched this short and stimulating TEDx talk by journalist Ryan Biller.

As Biller notes, social media can impoverish human interactions. It can serve as a hostile wall instead of a transparent window or an open door. I wrote to Biller to thank him for his talk and to share my perspective on echo chambers, siloed information, and the like, and he wrote back that social media can create “a merciless cycle and feedback loop that has a psychological ‘funhouse mirror’ effect; in other words, it exaggerates and distorts reality in, I think, a really negative way.”

We need to recognize how social media apps, sites, and algorithms manipulate us; how they’re designed to keep us clicking, scrolling, and otherwise (over)stimulated. And how these interactions are, in a way, dehumanizing. Or, if not dehumanizing, how they bring out the keyboard commando in some people.

With respect to echo chambers, what I do to combat that is to read a range of sources daily. I get daily updates from mainstream media sites like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe. I check sites like the British Guardian, NBC News, and BBC News. I occasionally turn to Fox News to see how certain events are being covered.

And then there are a range of alternative sites and podcasts that I’ve found useful, such as TomDispatch.com, Judging Freedom, Antiwar.com, Chris Hedges, Glenn Greenwald, and Caitlin Johnstone. I listen to (among others) Jimmy Dore, Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, Briahna Joy Gray, Max Blumenthal at The Grayzone. Of course, I don’t listen to all of these, all the time, nor do I listen to them because I always agree with them.

In having this site, Bracing Views, I contribute to this complex informational ecology, putting my own spin and exhibiting my own biases. I deeply appreciate my readers and commenters who have largely avoided the often unsocial nature of social media.

When I need a strong dose of humor and reality, I return to George Carlin. I am reminded that telling one’s truth in a provocative and humorous (and even profane) way can have great value.

Finally, remember that sometimes the best social interaction is sitting down and breaking bread with the people around you—even the people you disagree with. For I continue to believe that we can agree to disagree, that we can disagree in ways that aren’t disagreeable, and that sometimes disagreement can become agreement, and that common ground can be found.

Addendum: I shared the comment below in response to a reader who noted that manipulation is nothing ne

Absolutely. As I.F. Stone said, all governments lie. Propaganda is everywhere. But social media is more insidious because there’s an illusion of control. People think they’re the ones doing the picking and the clicking.

Not only are you often “swimming in the shallows” online–those shallows are more like a puddle whose boundaries are set by algorithms.

It’s fascinating to think of the ocean of information that’s out there even as some people are figuratively drowning in puddles partly of their own making.

America the Sick and Anxious

And so too are our kids

BILL ASTORE

NOV 25, 2025

“America’s children are unwell.” From the New York Times this morning:

Nearly one in four 17-year-old boys in the United States has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. In the early 1980s, a diagnosis of autism was delivered to one child in 2,500. That figure is now one in 31. Almost 32 percent of adolescents have at some point been given a diagnosis of anxiety. More than one in 10 have experienced a major depressive disorder, my colleague Jia Lynn Yang reports.

And the number of mental health conditions is expanding. A child might be tagged with oppositional defiance disorder or pathological avoidance disorder. “The track has become narrower and narrower, so a greater range of people don’t fit that track anymore,” an academic who studies children and education told Jia Lynn. “And the result is, we want to call it a disorder.”

Why did this happen? A lot of reasons. Kids spend hours on screens, cutting into their sleep, exercise and socializing — activities that can ward off anxiety and depression. Mental health screenings have improved.

And then there’s school itself: a cause of stress for many children and the very place that sends them toward a diagnosis.

I can’t read the main article since it’s behind a paywall. The gist of the article is that American schooling is hyper competitive, constricting, perhaps too demanding, and therefore a big part of the problem.

Maybe. Schools are also chronically underfunded. Teaching remains an underpaid profession. Classrooms can be overcrowded. Standards vary widely. And parents are stressed as they try to get their kids into the “right” schools. It’s not hard to see how that educational ecosystem might amplify distress.

But the explosion in ADHD diagnoses, autism, and anxiety is surely also driven by Big Pharma.* “We’ve got a drug for that” should be the motto of these companies. Americans are bombarded every day with drug ads promising to change our lives. I’m not a parent myself, but if my kid had trouble focusing or otherwise had behavioral issues, I’d explore medication as an option. I’m guessing it’s easier to get a prescription for Adderall or Ritalin than for kids to get wise treatment and sustained counseling from a psychiatrist or other mental health specialist.

Not just “mother’s little helper”

Some parents may even feel that particular diagnoses confer a kind of status— confirmation that their child is not merely struggling but exceptional in some “high-functioning” or creatively gifted way. That, too, reflects broader cultural forces.(“Annie is autistic and really too intelligent/creative/artistic/sensitive for this world.”)

But beyond parental dysfunction, omnipresent screens, school pressures, and pharmaceutical marketing, there’s a deeper question: Are our kids simply mirroring the broader dysfunction of American society? We live in a culture marked by relentless competition, materialism, polarization, and chronic stress. There’s little about our adult world that could be described as calm or balanced. If our society itself is unwell, why would we expect our kids to feel—or behave—otherwise?

I know it’s not easy, but surely kids need to unplug more (especially from social media, with all its pressures). They need to get outside more. They need to play more—they need more unstructured time. They probably need less stimulation—and arguably more time to be, in a word, bored. To find their own way to play, their own hobbies and interests to pursue, their own path in life.

A dysfunctional society produces dysfunctional kids. If that’s true, how do we make a society that better serves everyone? If American society and culture is uniquely disorienting and destabilizing, can’t we change that? Can’t we make a better saner world for our kids?

Grim factoid: In 2008, Americans consumed 80% of the world’s opioid supply. Though that percentage has dropped to roughly 40% today, what is it about American life that is so painful? Why are we so addicted to (legal and illegal) drugs? And now our kids too?

Readers, what do you make of all this?

*By no means am I dismissing mental illness; my brother Stevie had his first schizophrenic episode when he was sixteen in 1973 and never fully recovered from it. I have friends with a daughter with severe Asperger’s syndrome. My concern here is the vast increase in ADHD, autism, and similar diagnoses and the potential reasons for this.