More and more people are spending time online scrolling through media – particularly short form video, like what one would find on TikTok or Facebook Reels. The content on these platforms can be entertaining and informative, but it also increasingly creates problems related to its algorithm.
ALL social media algorithms are designed to increase time spent online and engagement. To do that, they are designed to introduce new content related to your viewing habits. Because showing you the same content would get stale very quickly, the algorithm is designed to show increasingly more “engaging” content over time, and to do that, the content tends to lean heavily towards more controversial topics that generate interest.
For example, if you watch a video on healthy cooking, you may soon see content related to natural foods, and eventually misinformation about dietary restrictions. All of this will happen over an extended period of time, often without your knowledge, and because it’s short form content, a person may process it quickly without realizing they’re being led down a “rabbit hole.”
We see this frequently – and often dangerously – with conspiracies, religious, and political content. Viewing a post on vaccines, can lead to posts on vaccine conspiracies, which eventually turn into anti-government conspiracies and often increasingly complex or easily disproven conspiracies. Religious content can be especially problematic, because a positive and uplifting religious post can eventually lead to content related to the end times and sin.
Over time, we’re seeing the damaging affects of this – family members that are becoming “algorithm poisoned” – an informal online term that refers to a person that is believing more and more of the misleading, conspiratorial, or controversial content that is showing up in their algorithm.
The question is: what happens next?
Noticing a Change
Something shifts, and it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when, but it is becoming worrisome:
- A parent starts forwarding videos that don’t sound like anything they used to believe.
- A sibling gets defensive the moment a topic comes up, as if disagreement itself is an attack.
- A spouse spends hours scrolling and comes away more certain, more anxious, and more distant than before.
You begin to worry about this person, because their posts, beliefs, or behaviors become increasingly ungrounded from reality, and it is beginning to seem like it’s spiraling out of control.
The phrase “algorithm poisoned” is an online, informal term that describes what happens when a person’s information diet narrows so far, and so gradually, that their sense of reality starts to bend around it. This shows up across the political spectrum and far beyond it — in health and wellness spaces, financial and investment communities, conspiracy theories, and plenty of corners of the internet that don’t fit a tidy label at all.
How This Takes Hold
Short-form platforms and recommendation feeds are built to hold attention, not to present a balanced picture of the world. The more a person engages with a certain kind of content, even if it can be argued the content is largely harmless, the more of it they get, and the less of anything else.
However, if the content was exactly the same, boredom would take hold. What the algorithms find – intentionally or unintentionally – is that misinformation, incomplete content, controversial content, and the like generate more interest and engagement. Over time, the content that a person watches within this information environment becomes less and less likely to be based in reality.
Repetition is also a problem. Hearing the same claim, the same framing, and the same sense of urgency dozens of times a day starts to feel like confirmation, even when the underlying source is the same handful of accounts saying the same thing in slightly different ways all to generate views. It can start to feel like everyone agrees, because the feed has quietly filtered out everyone who doesn’t.
The people most susceptible to this usually aren’t the ones we’d expect. A person doesn’t need to be conspiratorial to become it, although a person prone to conspiracy is certainly at risk. Any number of issues can create susceptibility, including:
- Loneliness
- Grief
- A Job Loss
- Retirement
- An Empty Nest
- A Health Scare
- Financial Troubles
- Stress Over World Events
- Existential Questions about Religion
These are far more common entry points than gullibility or lack of education. A person going through one of these transitions is often looking for certainty, community, or a sense of control, and an algorithm that keeps surfacing content promising exactly that can fill a genuine need, even while it causes serious harm.
Why It Can Feel Like They’ve Become a Different Person
Sometimes, the change has very clear and obvious signs that something is wrong. For example, family members often describe a loved one starting to sound scripted, using phrases and talking points that don’t match how they used to speak. When someone spends hours a day absorbing the same handful of voices, some of that language becomes their own.
There may also be signs of a fear and urgency that wasn’t there before. A lot of high-engagement content relies on a sense that something important is being hidden or that time is running out, and that framing can bleed into how a person talks about everything else, not just the specific topic that hooked them.
There may be signs of mistrust that used to not exist. Family, longtime friends, and mainstream institutions can start to feel suspect, while people the person has never met in person become trusted authorities. That reversal, more than any specific belief, is usually what makes the relationship feel strained.
However, in other cases, it’s simply that their beliefs, behaviors, emotions, and more do not match the person they were. Someone can be kind, caring, and introspective and, seemingly out of nowhere, sound paranoid, angry, and unwilling to listen. Those changes make it difficult to look at them the same way.
The Helplessness of Being Unable to Help
Often, direct confrontation is the instinct most people reach for first. It’s also usually the least effective response. Presenting a list of facts or corrections tends to put a person on the defensive rather than opening them up, since it treats the conversation as a debate to win rather than a relationship to protect.
Mockery and ultimatums tend to backfire for a similar reason. Both send the message that the relationship is now conditional on the belief, which often pushes a person further toward the online community that isn’t asking them to change anything.
The topic can still come up over time. The way in tends to count for more than the argument itself.
What Can Help
Family therapists and communication researchers point to a few approaches that hold up better than confrontation:
- Stay Curious Instead of Combative — Asking genuine questions about what a person finds compelling, rather than immediately countering it, keeps the conversation open instead of adversarial.
- Protect the Relationship First — Making it clear that the relationship isn’t contingent on agreement gives a person less reason to retreat further into an online community that feels unconditional by comparison.
- Look for the Need Underneath the Belief — Fear, a desire for control, a sense of purpose, or a need for community are often what’s really being addressed by the content, even when the specific claim is the visible part.
- Limit How Much the Topic Dominates Contact — Bringing up the same disagreement every time you talk trains a person to expect conflict from you specifically, which makes them less likely to engage at all.
- Try to Encourage Them to Get Offline – Though it can be difficult, encourage them to consider limiting their scrolling or deleting it altogether. They are unlikely to comply, but the hope is that someday, if they are able to obtain a bit of clarity, they make the connection between the algorithm and their beliefs and know that they need to log off.
This kind of approach is slow, and it doesn’t always work. It gives a relationship the best chance of staying intact long enough for a person to reconsider on their own terms, which tends to happen far more often than a single confrontation ever does.
Taking Care of Yourself Through This
Unfortunately, one of the most common recurring issues is that this isn’t always something you can change. While we’d like to believe the person we loved is still there, the truth is that we have very little control over others. If someone has fallen into this algorithm trap, sometimes only that person can get them out.
Watching someone change like this is exhausting, and it’s fair to grieve the version of the relationship that existed before. That loss that you feel is a valid feeling, even when the person is still physically present.
Setting limits on how much of a conversation, a visit, or a phone call gets absorbed by the topic is what makes it possible to stay in the relationship for the long run. But you also have to be willing to accept a person’s change, no matter how much you love them. If their beliefs and actions are causing you harm, emotionally, psychologically, or even physically, you have to decide for yourself what the best path forward is.
When to Get Outside Help
Some situations move past what patience and good communication can address on their own: financial exploitation, safety concerns, a complete break in contact, or signs that the person’s daily functioning, sleep, or physical health is deteriorating. Those situations call for professional support, not just a better conversation.
Right Path Counseling works with individuals and families navigating exactly this kind of strain. Individual therapy can help when the toll is landing on you specifically, couples counseling can help when the person is a spouse or partner, and senior counseling is available for families navigating this with an aging parent. Reach out at (516) 247-6457 or through our contact page to talk through what your family is dealing with.
