Abstract
Democracy depends on an information environment in which the media provide relevant news and information to citizens who are interested in public issues and willing to become knowledgeable about what is happening in society. In this article, we analyse Australians’ narratives about their daily social media use patterns. We first map media-related challenges that face democratic societies. Then we analyse, based on our original qualitative research (focus groups, in-depth interviews, and media diaries of 66 Australians), dominant media patterns and sentiments: the (excessive) time spent on commercial social media; and avoidance and apathy. These, we conclude, have serious consequences for the healthy functioning of a democratic society. The landscape of commercial social media is associated with disengagement, withdrawal, and a reluctance to participate in democratic life.
‘Watched 1 1/2 movies on Netflix… before I got too tired and went to bed. Whilst watching, I also looked on Seek where I updated my job profile and occasionally picked up my phone and browsed through Facebook, Instagram, and did a bit of online shopping, bought a couple of new dresses via an advertisement on Facebook. Whilst watching Netflix and scrolling on my phone, I was feeling relaxed, in my pyjamas after a busy day. I was surprised to read that there was another earthquake in our area again today. I didn’t feel a thing.’ Female Participant of Media and Civic Disposition Study, 2024.
Introduction
The above quote captures a typical pattern of media use by one of our respondents: media as part of a daily ritual centred around relaxation, with only a distant engagement with the realm of public issues. The major local event of the day received only a passing observation. This convergence of news and information with entertainment and consumption is characteristic of the current media environment described by our participants. There was a fragmented engagement with multiple sources of media at once; a hyper-tailored, personalised media diet constructed to reflect the user's current mood; attention spread thinly across a spectrum of relaxation, escapism and self-optimisation (including career maintenance); and a structural flow of activity between social media platforms and commercial (shopping) sites.
Perhaps the most dramatic change in social structures in recent years has been the transformation of the media environment, radically reconfigured by always-on networked devices and the commercial platforms they support. The distinction between news, entertainment, and sociality becomes increasingly blurred as social media platforms play an increasingly important role in people's media consumption habits (Park et al., 2025). At the same time, legacy media find their economic models under stress thanks to the flow of advertising dollars to online platforms, while public service media face pressure from funding cuts and competition for attention on these same platforms. Given the crucial role the media play in supporting democratic deliberation, any major shift in media structures warrants attention for its political and cultural consequences. There has been much speculation about the impact of the rise of the internet and social media on democracy, especially in light of the recent rise of right-wing populism globally. This study is part of a project that explores patterns of media use in Australia and how these relate to civic values and democratic commitments. We base our findings on focus groups and interviews with a cross-section of Australians to learn how they characterise and reflect upon their media use. We learned that in a context of information glut (see Andrejevic, 2011) and the accelerated pace of information flow and the activities this supports, media use is treated less as a civic duty (to stay informed, for example), and more as a means of passing the time in ways that provide diversion from the stress of the day. This is not a novel media use, but it takes on increased importance in an information saturated media environment characterised by the convergence of news, entertainment, and sociality. Many of our respondents did not make clear distinctions between dedicated news outlets and converged media platforms, placing Facebook on the same information plane as, for example, the ABC. Both are sources of passing the time, both provide news and entertainment, both can be assessed as an information source on similar terms, despite their very different institutional and societal roles. The culture of customisation that characterises media outlets in the interactive era aligns with an attitude toward media consumption that is defined more by consumer than civic values.
In Australia, as in other democratic nations, the media play a crucial role in informing citizens about issues of public interest. At the heart of a well-functioning democracy is meaningful democratic participation, which is based on a well-informed citizenry willing to engage in meaningful forms of deliberation and participation (De Tocqueville, 2000; Garnham, 1983; McChesney, 2004). Scholars have provided evidence on how community media, public broadcasting, and local newspapers cultivate and stimulate civic engagement by, for instance, establishing a shared awareness of common problems, opportunities, and interests (Brett et al., 2024; Garnham, 1983; McChesney, 2004; Peck, 2008; Shaker, 2014). Media serve as our informational circulation systems, and structural shifts in their operation have important implications for how citizens understand the social world beyond their direct experience – and their position in it (Turner, 2018). Dramatic changes in the media landscape have significantly transformed the ways in which citizens inform themselves about news and current events and participate in democratic debates (Dahlgren, 2009; Prior, 2018). Around 60% of the world's population uses commercial social media (Statista, 2023), which have become primary sources of information and shape people's political attitudes and decisions. These media developments – including the rise of international tech platforms – have raised serious concerns for functioning democracy. Such concerns are, in turn, embedded in the broader question of how people view (and feel) the significance, both social and personal, of information about current events and public issues (Bennett and Livingston, 2018); and how they are predisposed towards information on (social) media.
Earlier media scholarship mostly understood social media as enabling social and democratic engagement, information diffusion, and the formation of spaces for new voices to be heard (see for example, Harris and Johns, 2021; Placek, 2023; Skoric et al., 2015). However, recently scholars from diverse disciplines and different parts of the world have provided evidence on weakening democratic communicative norms and have analysed the ways in which commercial social media have profoundly reshaped our democracies; the ways we participate, and communicate with each other; and if/how we consume news (see Boulianne, 2020; De Zúñiga et al., 2024; Esposito and Khosravi, 2023; Fortunati, 2023; Harris and Johns, 2021; Mutsvairo and Rønning, 2020). These scholars have reconceptualized commercial social media from being tools of democratic empowerment to weapons equally well suited to anti-democratic, autocratic ends. In the same vein, accusations have been raised against commercial social media especially regarding the anti-democratic impact of hyper-commercialization (Gershberg and Illing, 2022; Pickard, 2021; Volcic and Andrejevic, 2022) combined with new forms of targeted curation, and platform imperatives of stickiness and engagement. Morozov (2011) argued that it is the pursuit of profit that drives commercial social media, not any concern for the notion of a shared common good or of democratic values. Despite their apparently immense commercial and economic utility, critics write, these platforms contribute to democratic backsliding (for example, spreading extremism and hate speech). These authors show how forms of trust in the practices and institutions once used to adjudicate between rival accounts of the world significantly decrease with social media use. They contend that the dominant commercial social media platforms are structured in ways that are directly antithetical to democratic values: hyper-individualism and self-branding is promoted; engagement is privileged over accuracy; and the format is too short and high-turnover for meaningful, civic deliberation (Brett et al., 2024). Feminist philosopher Judith Butler has weighed in on the impact of commercial social media for democracy: ‘The quickness of social media allows for forms of vitriol that do not exactly support thoughtful debate’ (in Ferber, 2020). Empirical research points out how users – when they spend time on commercial social media – are less motivated to learn about politics and current events, less engaged in public debates, typically selecting and preferring entertainment (more in Cacciatore, 2018; Gherghina et al., 2021).
As scholars increasingly lament the decline of democracy, and worry about the consequences of alienation, cynicism, and apathy among publics (Pfeifer, 2021; Tucker, 2024), only a few have explored qualitatively the connection between the use of commercial social media and civic attitudes (Hunter, 2023; Morozov, 2011; Sabatini and Sarracino, 2019). Methodologically, the study of media patterns and democracy has been more quantitative than qualitative (Andersen et al., 2024). What is then further needed in the analysis of the impact of media transformations on democracy, is qualitative research on what and how media users approach commercial social media and how this affects their democratic participation. Our premise is that it is no longer enough to ask people where they get their news, because news seeking behaviour is not a distinct practice: the increasing predominance of commercial social media means that people are often learning about current events on platforms that mix news with entertainment and social life, in ways quite distinct from the experience of reading a newspaper or watching the evening news (Swart et al., 2018). Generational effects in news consumption – including the displacement of TV use by online and social media (Park et al., 2024) – suggest it is important to consider how overall patterns of social media consumption correlate with participants’ engagement, their views about issues connected to democracy; and their attitude toward democratic participation. While the Australian media landscape is heavily commercialised and privatised, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), a public broadcaster, has retained a central position within the nation. But recent studies indicate the growing distrust by Australians in democratic institutions, including the ABC – although it remains the most trusted media source in the country (Brett et al., 2024: 175). This is especially relevant, because globally, and in Australia specifically, interest in news has been falling: in 2016, 64% of Australians had high interest in news, but in 2024 only 54% say they do (Park et al., 2024: 16). Although the degree of the shift has been the subject of debate, the trend line is clear.
This article draws on original research of media diaries, focus groups, and qualitative in-depth interviews with 66 Australians of different political orientations, class, age, and ethnic-cultural backgrounds, on their social media habits, sentiments, and interest in democratic participation. We first map key scholarship on media and democracy, followed by our methodological approach and data collection. The analysis section presents key results and observations from the research. Our findings contribute to the body of literature that explores the relationship between social media use and civic attitudes. The conclusions consider how commercial social media, for our participants, are far from being the locus of interconnectedness, engagement, and healthy democratic debate. Rather, our respondents associate social media use with time-wasting, distraction, apathy, news avoidance – in short, practices detrimental to engagement and participation in processes of democratic self-governance.
Commercial social media and democracy
The relationship between media, news consumption, democracy, and participation in public life has been of a key concern in media research (Boczkowski, 2021; McChesney, 2004; Turner, 2018). The media of interest to this study refer to those technologies and platforms that allow for the communication of news, information, entertainment that shape our understanding of the world. As scholars have long noted, a robust media system is crucial to democracy, because of the role the media play in providing information about public affairs and equipping the public with the tools and platforms to express their views, deliberate, and mobilise. Historically, the creation of public service media resulted from an understanding that the market does not necessarily provide the full range of information a democratic society needs to function – it must be complemented by media organisations that are not solely motivated by profit (Bennett and Livingston, 2018; Garnham, 1983). While commercial media's main purpose was always to gain profit (Peck, 2008), public media follow specific codes of conduct, with an aim to provide education, entertainment, and news about public matters in order to help democracy flourish (Brants and Van Praag, 2015). There have long been concerns about the increasing commercialisation and privatisation of the media sector internationally. For example, in their analysis of media patterns in 27 European countries, Fraile and Iyengar (2014) showed that news exposure via public media was positively related to political knowledge and democratic engagement, whereas commercial news exposure was negatively related. Empirical evidence shows how public media, in different parts of the world, create more diverse, investigative, and less sensationalised programming that serves democratic publics, whereas commercial media's primary focus remains profit (Pickard, 2021).
A large body of empirical evidence now documents that commercial social media have changed conditions for democratic participation, affecting civic discussions through algorithmic curation (Bennett and Livingston, 2018; De Zúñiga et al., 2024). Burgess et al. (2017) provide a useful definition of ‘social media’ as ‘digital platforms, services and apps built around the convergence of content sharing, public communication, and interpersonal connection’ (13). The most common social media platforms employed by our participants are commercial Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, and YouTube. Scholars have focused on affective practices and ‘gut feelings’ that have become dominant on social media and politics, at the expense of deliberation (see Berlant, 2022; Morozov, 2011). Enders et al. (2023) write that individuals who get their news mainly from social media express more belief in misinformation. Similarly, Vraga and Tully (2021) find that people's ‘knowledge of media structures and effects’ (157) is negatively associated with seeing more news and political content on Facebook and YouTube. Lie (2018) shows how heavy social media users in Norway are more socially and politically fragmented, disconnected, and alienated from democratic engagement. She writes that, while Facebook enables new forms of online organising, it also displaces local community media that help create a shared public sphere in which participants are able not just to gather information, but to develop an awareness and interest in local happenings, and volunteering that leads to social interconnectedness and democratic deliberation. Moreover, Goyanes et al. (2021) find that ‘social media news use directly activates citizens’ uncivil discussions and unfriending’. Employing surveys in Sweden, Shehata and Strömbäck (2021) concluded that using social media to follow news about politics and current affairs does not compensate for not using public news media in terms of participating meaningfully in democracy. Lee and Xenos (2019) further found that daily social media use has a moderately negative effect on political knowledge and willingness to participate in democratic discussions.
Recently, high-profile speculation about the allegedly pathological effects of commercial social media has circulated widely in academic and popular discourses (Dubois and Blank, 2018; Fletcher et al., 2020; Haidt, 2024; Pariser, 2011). A crucial task for addressing contemporary concerns about the relationship between the commercial social media ecosystem and democracy is to move beyond an overly narrow focus on media content. The problem of ‘content’ needs reconsideration in our era characterised by content overload – since it is just one factor within a mix that also includes: the attitudes people bring toward news and media, the context of their media use, and the way this use is incorporated into the rhythms of daily life (Fletcher et al., 2020; Lottridge et al., 2022; Villi et al., 2021). The factors that require more investigation – not least because they are harder to examine – include the set of dispositions and practices that people bring to their experience of information about news and current events in the media. As Turner (2018) writes, the civically disposed citizen only exists within the context of democracy, and we argue it is important to play close attention to the modality of the social fabric – habits and dispositions, or what De Tocqueville (2000) describes as ‘manners’. Civic disposition then refers to the willingness to participate and engage in the political processes of democracy. What counts is the mindset our participants bring to this information – what we are calling their disposition toward the news – and further, how this connects to (dis)engagement from participating in politics and democratic debates.
Research methodology
Employing qualitative research, we conducted ten online Zoom focus groups in September 2024 selected through a recruitment media agency (Essential Media) representing a diverse target audience across Australia, to qualitatively explore media habits, civic identities, and participation. Each group consisted of six participants each, organised into groups of low, medium, or high trust in institutions (namely the government and the mainstream media, which we pre-determined in a screening survey), and organised into age group clusters: 18–34, 35–54, and 55–70 years old, each age group broken down into the low, medium, high trust. We also had one focus group consisting of a self-identified culturally linguistically diverse demographic. Each group had a demographic feature in common, whether that be identifying as a culturally and linguistic minority or certain age range, and within each group was a diversity of gender identification and living locations from across Australian cities and rural areas. Additionally, six in-depth interviews were conducted.
We followed Dawson (2020) and Lunt and Livingstone (1996): they describe focus groups as a qualitative research method used to gather insights into how people narrate their participation, consumption, and interaction with various forms of media. Since our focus groups were conducted online, we adapted these methodologies accordingly (see Bolin et al., 2023). Sessions lasted 1.5 h and were recorded and transcribed. Main topics included: time and types of social media content consumed; levels of civic participation and trust; reflections on their social media patterns; and sentiments around their use of commercial social media. We have employed textual analysis (Bolin et al., 2023); identified recurring topics; and conducted an open code of these, while grouping them into main themes. In the second wave of research, eight in-depth interviews were conducted in October 2024.
Participants also completed media diaries over the course of 7 consecutive days. A media diary is a research method used to track and analyse an individual's media usage over a specific period of time. It was designed to capture detailed information about media habits, preferences, patterns, sentiments, and it is typically conducted over a week or so (see Dawson, 2020; Hyers, 2018; Lev-On and Lowenstein-Barkai, 2024; Wagner et al., 2022). They recorded their media activities and time spent on all different media (e.g. TV, radio, internet, print); types of content consumed; devices used, and an open text reflection about attitudes toward each entry. This allowed us to analyse their captured real-time social media consumption and reflections about their thoughts and feelings regarding commercial social media usage. This further helped us to identify and focus on sentiments and patterns in commercial social media usage.
The transcripts and notes from the focus groups, as well as the written content of the media diaries, were qualitatively organised into thematic analysis. ‘Thematic analysis is a method for identifying, analysing and reporting patterns (themes) within data’ (Braun and Clarke, 2006); and ‘a theme is a declarative phrase or sentence describing a process, a connection, or an insight’ (Rossman and Rallis 2017). This qualitative process depended on the subjective interpretation of the research analysts who worked in close communicative proximity to ensure intercoder reliability – with one lead/primary coder.
We coded media diary ‘excerpts’ of participants’ text – keywords and phrases of interest – into the platform and subsequently saved and organised to see patterns, habits, and behaviours of interest come to the fore. This thematic analysis has the key benefit of flexibility, which we found useful to describe our data set in ‘(rich) detail’ (Braun and Clarke, 2006; Saldaña, 2025). Our major thematic categories were a) Either commercial or non-commercial media channels (also noting the specific names of the platforms); b) The nature of content: e.g. shopping, news, sport, gaming; c) The mode of engagement: escapism, connecting with others, unwinding, doomscrolling, etc.
We pulled out key quotes and patterns in the media diaries which were carried out before the focus groups, and these habits, dispositions, and attitudes towards news and civic engagement or lack thereof informed our construction of focus group questions, which were executed in a semi-structured interview form, to create consistency across focus groups (ensuring we asked the same questions to each focus group) but allowing organic follow-up questions.
The thematic categories certainly overlapped, particularly between b) and c) – the nature of and mode of engagement with the content – but this was not an issue, as our intention was to gauge a rich, narrativised understanding of media habits – medium, message, and mode – in order to map our qualitative concept of civic disposition. A limitation could be the subjective nature of discerning the thematic categories as well as the shifting of the thematic goalposts – upon reading new entries, new themes tended to organically arise – however this provided welcomed complexity to our research question. Overall, our intention was to look for correlation between civic disposition and media habits, rather than ‘proven’ causality. Furthermore, the category a) yielded some useful, surprising revelations of alternative, fringe media platforms hitherto unknown to the researches, which aided in our follow-up questions particularly re exploration of multiple participants’ disposition of distrust in mainstream media, as well as textual analysis of the platform itself (from participants screenshot) and our own navigation of the site.
Two major findings from our research are detailed in the following section.
Qualitative results: two dominant narratives on commercial social media and democracy
We found there was an overwhelming sense of information saturation and overload on the part of participants. In the words of one respondent (male, 58): ‘…we have social media… and everyone has an opinion on everything, and there's so much information out there’. Most participants (including a female, 48) reported how they now ‘avoid… the news… because I just feel like it's filled with bad news all the time…’ These narratives, as it will be further shown, reflect on the negative perceptions about information overload and potential consequences for civic interest and engagement. As one participant (male, 24) who uses social media heavily (over three hours on average per day), asked: ‘Why am I on social media? On these platforms? Is it beneficial to me or is it just a habit or an escape or so forth?’ For the sake of clarity, we devote in-depth focus to two standout themes evident in participants’ narratives on their commercial social media usage, disposition, and democracy. These are ‘time suck’ and apathy and avoidance.
Time suck: wasting time online
The amount of time ‘wasted’ on social media was also referred to as ‘mindless scrolling’ or ‘doom scrolling’. Asking participants to record the approximate total duration of time spent each day on commercial social media showed large quantities of ‘wasted time’, such as a female participant (38) spending 5 hours on TikTok per day, claiming ‘nothing stood out, just wasted time’. Similar lamentations included: ‘I'm aware I do waste a lot of time… More than I should…’ (male, 62); ‘So much mindless scrolling… not even realizing I'm picking up my phone and then going on to Facebook or Instagram and just scrolling…’ (female, 29); ‘It is just doom scrolling … it's not actually being used for anything that's needed’(female, 35); ‘It's just a repetition thing… doing the same thing day in, day out, just no real reason at all’ (male, 38). Overall, participants pointed out how they do not engage with the news in the media in a thoughtful manner, indicating a lack of time spent for the purpose of being informed. Most describe their social media usage as out of control, since they spend time on it with no intent or purpose: ‘for no real reason at all, except just constantly scrolling through the video for two seconds’ (male, 38).
It was common for participants to be unable to remember what information they encountered and were exposed to. The model of swiping and scrolling was associated with a flow of information in which each new sensation eclipsed what came before, until they all merged into an affective blur. A female participant (38), who spent an hour on Facebook in the middle of the day journalled: ‘I just scrolled, can’t really remember anything’. Over 70 per cent of our participants reported that nothing particularly stood out during their media use, while checking commercial social media intermittently all day long ‘out of habit’, in constant syncopated engagement: ‘nothing stood out, just a quick scroll’ (man, 38). Many come to their daily use of social media already tired, with no interest to learn or become informed. As Van Erkel and Van Aelst (2021) demonstrated for their informants, there was a lack of attention, news focus, ability to recollect any idea, and learning from social media. They find evidence that following news via commercial social media increases a feeling of information overload, which decreases what people learn, since ‘mindless scrolling’ becomes the dominant practice. Users lose attention, express feelings of alienation, and, similar to our study, point to the so-called information overload. Empirical studies have shown that because of the information overload on commercial social media, citizens learn less from news on social media (Shehata and Strömbäck, 2021), instead becoming distracted and overwhelmed.
Furthermore, distraction has taken over engagement and participation in public issues, according to many participants: ‘Not proud of my [all-day] phone usage but there was nothing else to do – just TikTok…’ (male, 22). Participants are aware of the distracting nature of social media, such as: ‘Why am I doing this? Well, it's a bit of a distraction, right?’ (male, 39). Similarly, another participant (male, 33) noted: I spent over 15 min on Instagram this morning getting distracted and watching reels. I've been getting a lot of cat videos that do make me smile, but overall the whole thing was quite mindless… my brain is turned off… it's just such a procrastination tool. I had Binge in the background just playing The Office, and I'd had it on for 12 h straight. I couldn't believe how long… I wasn't even really watching (male, 32).
A notable mode of temporal engagement that commercial social media elicits is a spend-wasting of liminal time, filling the gaps between other possibly more necessary ventures like paid work, such as: ‘scrolling aimlessly in between work tasks’ (male, 31), or ‘scrolled through Facebook when I got home from work. Wasting time before having to make dinner’ (female, 42) – describing looking at reels of ‘mostly funny animals, or funny work memes’ which she sent back and forth to a friend to modulate her mood after a ‘bad day at work’. This highlights the habitual nature of many peoples’ reliance on commercial social media content to cheer themselves up, in line with Fortunati's (2023) observation that digital media offer ‘an incredible number of opportunities to redesign the attitudes, habits, routines, and behaviors of everyday life (43)’, providing escape from ‘shitty work’. A 38-year-old male reported purposefully watching some YouTube videos ‘to waste some time’, before he had to ‘head off for work for nightshift’.
Moreover, commercial social media time is not only liminal but malleable, with some participants manipulating the speed of their social media clips to optimise infotainment value extraction. This temporal tailoring points strongly to a therapeutic, customised and tailored ‘me’ mode rather than a democratic or collective ‘we’ mode. The erosion of collective/we mode is part of the fallout of depoliticisation (Turner, 2018). This is evident in many participant statements, including this participant (male, 41), who started his day ‘flicking through YouTube’ and engaging with: ‘Lex Clips’ which are clips from Lex Fridman's pod cast (sic). I prefer the clips because I pick and choose which parts of the conversation I can listen to rather than the long form which I occasionally listen to as well.
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Many participants reported their use of commercial social media making them feel significantly worse emotionally. The following 41-year-old man epitomised this sentiment: ‘I find social media to offer entertainment, but then doesnt [sic] really deliver… you really just end up unsatisfied… I guess almost like junk food’. Many reported feelings of boredom, such as in the following excerpts: ‘being on Facebook… aimless scrolling- very boring’ (female, 49). Other negative emotions, while being on social media, also included: ‘I don’t enjoy going down those rabbit holes’ (female, 34); and ‘I always felt distracted and annoyed’ (female, 54). Regarding Instagram usage, a 35-year-old female participant reported: ‘chatting to friends and scrolling reels not going to lie this is making me disgusted in how much time I spend… I just doom scroll’. Berlant's (2011) concept of ‘cruel optimism’ is helpful here to understanding these affective experiences social media help to produce, as it describes a relationship where something one desires – such as connection, and meaningful engagement – actually becomes an obstacle to what it promises. Social media in these narratives are positioned as spaces of disappointment, even boredom and loneliness, and a sense of being overwhelmed by information, and conflict. They become sites of uncertainty, fear, and polarisation rather than community dialogue and deliberation.
Doom scrolling unsurprisingly elicits a range of doom and gloom emotions, as Steinert et al. (2022) report in their research on the importance of exploring emotions and how individuals spend their time on social media. When asked to reflect on their social media usage on the final day of the media diary, 30 out of our 66 respondents (45%) reported a palpably negative association with their social media usage: ‘Social media is largely a distraction tool rather than an entertainment/informative one and has generally left me feeling quite low. Just tired’. (female, 21). Similarly a 46-year-old man stressed how ‘…the amount of negative news and false news posted on news media and facebook’ make him feel powerless, and lonely. Moreover, 32 out of our 66 respondents – 48% of participants – reported ‘surprise’ and ‘shock’ at excessive time suck and waste. For instance: ‘I was surprised at how much time I was spending’ (female, 33). All in all, there is a dull, ‘mind numbing’ (man, 33) modality of engagement that is antithetical to whatever form of engagement might underlie the promise that social media could or would be a ‘democratising’ medium (see, for example, Jenkins (2007) on ‘participatory culture’). Rather, the dominant perception of the uses of the medium tend more toward, ‘wasting time… scrolling with no thought and no reason why’ (female, 35) epitomised in a 33-year-old man's reflection that social media ‘made me feel that I waste a lot of time using media platforms which add no value to my life’. The descriptions are not entirely novel, but reflect the commercial development of a medium designed not to inform so much as to addict and divert, relegating participation to repeated forms of swiping, and minimal, pre-scripted responses (like, share, etc.). Interestingly, the use of media to ‘kill time’ as a sort of therapeutic numbing in response to the stressors and pressures of daily life is not novel. The descriptions of our participants recall, in certain respects, the findings of Kubey and Csikszentmihalyi's study of television addiction. They found that, ‘people who were watching TV …reported feeling relaxed and passive…What is more surprising is that the sense of relaxation ends when the set is turned off, but the feelings of passivity and lowered alertness continue. Survey participants commonly reflect that television has somehow absorbed or sucked out their energy, leaving them depleted’ (2002).
A consistent theme in our own study was the expressed desire to change one's media habits because they are negatively affecting their usage of time and mental wellbeing. This desire to change was palpable in the final diary reflection entry where, as researchers, we gained surprising new insights into the large extent to which the participants expressed being stuck in a social media time suck, but wanting out, wanting to ‘be better’; have better media habits, to improve their media diet. This self-aware confessional desire to improve can be read as symptomatic of the dominant modality of algorithmic engagement that incites a siloed self-optimisation. However, this produced an interesting double-edged sword: participants being hyper-engaged while feeling disengaged, with a surprising collective pushback against algorithmic control. For instance a participant (male, 33) noted that the media diary exercises ‘has definitely made me aware that I need to branch out more and be open to more kinds of media’. However, this same participant also noted that ‘I also really noticed how frustrating it can be for me when politics is entered into my viewed content’.
Participants described themselves as distracting themselves to the state of exhaustion with their social media usage. As media research points out, users develop ‘dissociative’ strategies – such as tuning out, or disengaging – as a way to manage overwhelming time spent on social media (Berlant, 2022; Newman et al., 2022; Skovsgaard and Andersen, 2020; Van Erkel and Van Aelst, 2021). Berlant's work (2022) suggests that these tactics are not simply passive but can be understood as forms of affective survival. This affective survival is something shared in the collective consciousness of our hyper-individualised, hyper-online community. The next section looks at two distinct yet connected sentiments: avoidance and apathy. If avoidance is conceptualised as actively avoiding the news on social media, it can lead towards apathy, which political theorist Sunstein (2018) argues can lead towards disinterest, and democratic disengagement.
‘It's all too much’: avoidance and apathy
Avoidance and apathy towards news follow from our first theme of social media as a time suck. Disillusionment and disengagement arise from exhaustion – participants say they do not have the capacity to take on any more news, as ‘it's all too much’ (female, 36). This is exemplified in the following quote from a male (53) participant describing his social media use as yielding ‘very few news stories I was actually interested in. Nothing there’. This lack of interest, overall disillusionment, and withdrawal from participation has of course many reasons, including the commonly referenced sentiment that news is all doom and gloom. For instance, a male (59) stated he attempted to ‘keep up with the news’ one evening but found: ‘just more predominantly negative reports about people and incidents. No ‘real’ news, little to bring a smile to the face’. This news fatigue is part of an astounding trend of apathy that participants sense, with many turning away from and being frustrated with the democratic public sphere, epitomised by this user (male, 33): ‘I also really noticed how frustrating it can be for me when politics is entered into my viewed content’. Additionally, we note a trend of numbness in the lack of meaningful engagement (not processing or thinking), such as: ‘[this media diary exercise] has made me think how little I actually process and remember from looking at these sites’ (woman, 53); and ‘your questions… made me think how little I actually think… process and remember from looking at these sites’ (woman, 53).
We invoke Villi et al.'s (2021) definition of news avoidance as intentional rejection of news. 2 Intentional news avoidance is part of an increasing global trend where individuals intermittently disengage from the news on social media – an unsurprising response, perhaps, to the overwhelming amount of information available online via networked devices (Newman et al., 2022; Skovsgaard and Andersen, 2020; Toff and Kalogeropoulos, 2020). In short, the notion that more information is always better does not take into account the limits on people's time and attention. These diminishing returns are problematic for the continuing functioning of democracies, since democratic regimes are based on informed and participatory citizenry – particularly against the backdrop of commercialised social media, and rising numbers of general news avoiders (including most of our participants) tuning out current affairs completely (Schumann, 2018). The paradox of the online environment is that it promises more information than ever before, while simultaneously damping the actual uptake or meaningful engagement with that information. This is not simply a matter of diminishing returns to more information, but of negative returns. A medium that once promised to create a populace informed like never before ends up alienating users from that information.
Here, we focus on exploring our participants’ disposition, since the disposition brought to news avoidance already includes feelings of news overload. For example, our participants respond with news avoidance to ‘protect my mental sanity’ (female, 46), or a kind of remedial strategy (Park, 2019). They point to emotional self-management that is occupied with one's ‘wellbeing’ that plays a large part in the narratives – many participants expressed that they avoid the news because, paradoxically, they have no time and are exhausted, since the news negatively affects their ‘wellbeing’, as this participant (female, 38) claimed: ‘I just never watch the news because I just feel like it's filled with bad news all the time… I need to look after myself’. This is not simply a matter of a disengaged or lazy audience, but of the character of the information elevated by algorithms and by the inexorable pace of the platforms. It is well established that algorithms pump the most sensational and dopamine-inducing content into people's news feeds (Volcic and Andrejevic, 2022). The result described by participants is desensitisation through over-stimulation.
Of course, individual-level predispositions may motivate intentional news avoidance, such as lack of political interest (Strömbäck and Shehata, 2010). Notably, the concept of ‘apathy’ is helpful here, as our results connect to research on political disaffection that show how avoidance translates to and overlaps with alienation, cynicism, and apathy in particular (Pinkleton and Austin, 2004), with cynical citizens becoming indifferent and disengaged. In the words of two of our informants, who rarely follow politics: ‘I occasionally keep up with the news… only when something important happens’ (male, 42); and ‘I rarely seek out news unless it's brought to my attention’ (female, 36). It turns out that political information can be the most exhausting precisely because the way it is staged on social media is in terms of conflict and sensationalism. However, when it comes to political issues, avoidance is detrimental to an informed citizenry and problematic against the backdrop of citizens increasingly tuning out news media in general. All in all, we see both avoidance and apathy, as a part of a ‘democratic problem’, because of the normative implications for societies if some or many citizens are uninformed about issues that are relevant to their lives (Skovsgaard and Andersen, 2020).
Van Erkel and Van Aelst (2021) show that the more respondents feel overloaded, the less one scores on the political knowledge battery, and the more time one spends on Twitter and Facebook for news, the more one experiences overload (see also Gurr and Metag, 2021). Participants’ patterns of social media use prioritise sensational and entertaining content, but the overload requires new forms of managing it. Empirical data shows how news overload induces news avoidance by increasing news fatigue and diminishing civic participation (for example, Van Erkel and Van Aelst, 2021). Reactions to social media, as our results show, lead to specific content selectivity, and in some cases, drive participants to completely opt out of being informed. This opt-outificiation is connected with Pinkleton and Austin's work on disengagement, which they define as negative attitudes toward politics that discourages and slows down political participation (2004).
Overall, our participants cited news fatigue as a common sentiment surrounding news avoidance. Findings reveal a shared exhaustion-as-apathy in the midst of social media news and information saturation. As one of the participants (female, 46) narrates while explaining she is completely withdrawn: I feel like I am in a bit of a bubble at the moment, which has actually been quite nice, but is scary at the same time because I have no clue what's going on out there. It's not because I don't necessarily want to know, but it's more so that I just know, especially my own mental head space, trying to keep in my own lane a bit. There's times, where on social media, you're sort of bombarded with misinformation… Especially when there's been a tragedy in the world, opening up social media, and everyone's posting about it, and it can be tiring. The last thing I want to do is add to the noise and just want to look for something a little bit more light hearted…or stay out of it all (female, 48).
In the face of exhaustion with ‘all that is going on out there’, we also found that many participants were turning inward to focus energy on themselves, or what they think they can immediately control, and manage – which remains in the space of the self. One participant (male, 54) said about the news: ‘It does not affect me unless they are directly impacting on me nor I have any control on them. I don’t waste my opinions on matters where my opinion mostly does not matter…’ As Peck argued (2008), self-management is one of core tenets of therapeutic culture that promises to solve any (structural) problems via personal transformation.
In other words, as our participants narrated their patterns of social media use, it is evident that sentiments of apathy are compounded by distrust in misinformation. As one participant (female, 34) put it, she avoids engagement with news on social media because: I think there can be a lot of keyboard warriors on… social media… [which] I would definitely personally steer away from because I feel that there is more of that potential misinformation.
Conclusions
This article offers a portrait of contemporaneous patterns of social media use and dispositions towards news during a time of rapid technological transformation, and considers the implications for the promotion of an informed citizenry and habits of democratic participation. We argue that democracies are dependent on rich and relevant information, not simply to function well, but to function at all. And while there is certainly slippage between support for democracy in the abstract and committed democratic practices (Teti et al., 2019), citizens’ engagement is crucial for democratic survival. Our findings contribute to the body of literature that expresses concern about the relationship between social media use and civic attitudes (Turner, 2018). Our interviews indicate that social media use is not a promising resource for democratic engagement or participation, even as it takes on an increasingly important role in people's everyday media diets. Indeed, the nationally representative survey of 2000 Australians that went along with this research found social media took first place among the most used media among respondents. More than a third identified it as their most used media source, and almost two thirds ranked it in their top three.
If the pattern from our findings holds, an increasing reliance on social media as people's primary source of mediated information about the world is unlikely to enhance civic knowledge and engagement. Rather the short-form, high-turnover, dopamine-inducing content serves more as a means of managing the pathologies of an overwhelming media environment than turning it to democratic ends.
Commercial social media are disruptive in unpredictable ways. Overall, our qualitative findings build further on scholarship that identified commercial social media as key forces that foster exhaustion, fatigue, and dispersing attention (Sabatini and Sarracino, 2019). This aligns with an overall decline of trust and the rise of apathy and alienation toward news and the forms of civic life it underpins. Our findings corroborate recent empirical research showing the correlations between news overload, exhaustion, fatigue, trust in social media news, and democratic participation (Skovsgaard and Andersen, 2020). Whether social media, on their own, cause changes in people's civic disposition remains an important research question. Our findings focus on the correlation between attitudes toward news and reliance on social media platforms. It is also important to situate social media within the broader, increasingly commercialised media environment that produces content for the social media maw, while simultaneously taking cues from it.
The data on the media habits of our participants appear across all demographics, showing the pervasiveness of time suck, avoidance, and apathy of social media does not discriminate. Here, the medium is not only the message, but also the problem, to which our media-attuned attitudes and dispositions are intrinsically intertwined, at odds with our theorisation of civic engagement and disposition.
Our argument is not that new commercial social media has changed participants’ civic disposition, it is that new forms of social media (and the growing behemoth of market research and the billion-trillion dollar commercial enterprise ethos behind the corporations) prioritise and optimise the commercial potential over the social, civic potential of spaces to encourage deliberation and debate as integral to a robust, healthy democracy of informed, engaged citizens. The threat to civic disposition and democracy that we highlight in our study is not wholly due to commercial social media alone. Commercial media is one part of – albeit an integral and ever-increasing part of – the broader dismantling/erosion of the social fabric and the fragmentation of society evinced in neoliberalism's death drive toward hyper-individualism.
Ultimately, we call for a deeper understanding of how citizens’ connection and support for democracy is conditioned by social media use, as this can be supported or abandoned. One way to support democracy is to further explore the intricacies of people turning off their media. In the face of such findings, it is important to consider the role of social media in recent trends toward socio-political backsliding. At the same time, we argue for the importance of supporting alternatives to the growing domination of commercial platforms in the information environment, such as public service and independent media. Public media should continue to have a central role in democratic society with goals to inform, educate, elevate, and emancipate (Castro-Herrero et al., 2018; McChesney, 2004).
The medium of social media certainly has been utilised for political engagement and activism, promoting democratic values and mobilising apathetic citizens to engage in politics – for instance in Zohran Mamdani's recent electoral victory (Goodwin, 2026). This is not to be disregarded, despite minimal sentiments of offline political engagement captured in our study: only two of our 66 participants (in the 18–34 age group) referenced engaging in offline civic engagement (namely volunteering and attending a protest). One way forward could be the creation of a public service (public funded and operated) social media platform, whose imperatives are democratic rather than commercial.
Footnotes
Ethical approval and informed consent statements
Research has been approved by MUHREC, Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee, Project ID: 41352.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the Australian Research Grant, DP230103037.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Data availability statement
Not available.