Survey Results: How 8,178 People Try to Stop Doomscrolling
By Ted · March 10, 2026
I spent three months and thousands of dollars studying one question: can people stop doomscrolling with the tools available today? More than 8,000 people took the survey. After removing bots and low-quality entries, 1,043 complete responses remained. The analysis uses the 771 responses that passed the strictest reliability checks.
Respondents cared about information quality and were already trying to improve their feeds. Their answers point to a mismatch between the controls platforms provide and the recurring behavior people want to stop. These seven findings describe that gap and the feature supported by 89% of the reliable sample.
Finding 1: Users Care About Information Quality
The survey first tested whether people place much value on the quality of their feeds.
They do. 80% of respondents rated staying informed as Extremely or Very Important, and 79% gave the same ratings to filtering low-quality content. The problem is not a lack of interest in better information. Respondents want to use social media without sorting through so much unwanted material.
Finding 2: Misinformation Has the Largest Satisfaction Gap
I compared the importance of each need with respondents’ satisfaction in meeting it. Misinformation and fake news produced the largest gap.
The survey shows that users are dissatisfied with the amount of misleading material they encounter. It does not measure the ranking systems directly, but engagement-based feeds can reward provocative posts even when users say they value accuracy.
Finding 3: Built-In Controls Receive Low Success Ratings
When asked which methods they had tried, 82% reported using built-in controls such as Block, Mute, Not Interested, or Hide This Post.
Only 5.4% rated those methods Extremely Successful. That does not mean everyone else received no benefit, but it does show that very few respondents saw the controls as a complete solution.
The largest group, 43%, chose Somewhat Successful. Follow-up answers described repeated blocking and daily curation. The controls often help with an individual post or account while leaving users responsible for the same cleanup the next day.
Finding 4: The Same Patterns Return Through New Accounts
Respondents repeatedly described the same problem: blocking a source did not stop similar material from returning through other accounts.
“It didn’t matter if I unfollowed, deleted, muted or blocked … I’m still seeing it no matter how hard I tried.”
“If you remove interests, X puts them back. You cannot filter content.”
“The algorithm kept showing irrelevant content despite my attempts.”
Account-level controls cannot catch every copy, fan page, synonym, or new source. Respondents wanted a way to define the repeated behavior once and apply that choice across similar accounts.
Finding 5: Some Users Have Given Up
13% of respondents left the “what are you doing now” question blank or answered with one word: nothing.
Their other responses suggest fatigue after repeated attempts to curate the feed. Some people stop using the controls when the unwanted material keeps returning.
Their comments included: “Facebook cannot be trusted … we are not customers, we are the product,” “You cannot filter content,” and “There’s no way to get around it.” These answers show how quickly limited controls can turn into resignation.
Finding 6: Automatic Repeat-Offender Blocking Has Broad Support
At the end of the survey, 89% supported automatic repeat-offender blocking and 87% supported manual repeat-offender controls. Both ideas address the same request: apply a decision across accounts that repeatedly post similar unwanted material.
Email spam filters already learn from one report and apply that signal to similar senders. Instagram, X, YouTube, and TikTok generally require users to act on each account separately.
The survey did not ask the platforms why they have not built broader controls. Their advertising models reward time in the app, however, which can put stronger feed reduction tools at odds with a primary business metric.
What This Means for Anyone Trying to Stop Doomscrolling
The results put individual frustration in context. Most respondents had already tried the available controls, and few considered them fully successful.
Common advice includes curating more carefully, relying on willpower, or deleting the app. Respondents reported that daily curation often became another chore, while deleting an app did not address why they returned.
Current platform tools are still useful for reducing unwanted material even though they work mostly at the account, word, or post level. Our guides for X, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok identify the controls with the broadest effect on each platform.
The strongest result for product design is the 89% support for automatic repeat-offender blocking. People want one decision about a recurring pattern to carry across the rest of the feed.
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