Content creators in the United States are posting videos on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube that interrupt users’ scroll sessions to encourage them to close the app — a strategy researchers say may help plant early seeds of awareness about excessive platform use, even as academics debate whether heavy social media use constitutes addiction.
Most people substantially underestimate how much time they spend on social media, according to researchers, but experts are divided over whether heavy use meets the clinical definition of addiction — and recent research suggests that labeling oneself addicted may worsen, rather than improve, the ability to manage use.
Olivia Yokubonis, who goes by Olivia Unplugged on social platforms, has built a following posting videos that gently interrupt users’ feed experiences with reminders about habitual scrolling. She works for Opal, a screen time management app, though she said her content does not prominently feature the company’s branding. She described the strategic tension of reaching people inside the platforms she is urging them to use less.
“For us to actually be seen, we have to be where people are,” Yokubonis said. “It’s a fine line and a balance of finding a way to be able to cut through that noise but also not adding to the noise.”
Ofir Turel, a professor of information systems management at the University of Melbourne who has studied social media use for years, said most people “have no clue how much time they spend on social media.” In his research, Turel said, participants confronted with their actual screen time data were practically “in a state of shock,” and many voluntarily reduced their usage afterward.
The debate over ‘addiction’
Researchers and clinicians agree that some people spend more time on social media than they intend, but agreement generally stops there. Some experts argue that applying the term addiction requires identifiable symptoms — including strong, sometimes uncontrollable urges and withdrawal — and question whether heavy platform use meets that threshold. Others acknowledge the term’s colloquial resonance while stopping short of clinical endorsement.
Ian A. Anderson, a postdoctoral scholar at California Institute of Technology, said he observed the casual prevalence of people describing themselves as addicted to their phones and studied whether that self-description carried measurable consequences.
In a representative sample of active Instagram users, Anderson found that 18% of participants agreed they were at least somewhat addicted to the app and 5% indicated substantial agreement. Only 2% of participants were deemed at risk of addiction based on their reported symptoms.
The gap between self-perception and assessed risk carries practical implications, Anderson said.
“If you perceive yourself as more addicted, it actually hurts your ability to control your use or your perception of that ability and makes you kind of blame yourself more for overuse,” Anderson said. “There are these negative consequences to addiction perception.”
Anderson said anti-doomscrolling content could function as an effective disruption for attentive viewers, but expressed uncertainty about whether it reaches the most habitual users. “If you are really a habitual scroller, maybe you aren’t fully engaging with it,” he said. “It does sound like an interesting way to intervene from the inside.”
Platforms designed for engagement
Cat Goetze, a content creator who goes by CatGPT online, makes videos about artificial intelligence and technology and has publicly documented her own effort to reduce screen time. She said the challenge for individual users is structural.
“There’s a whole infrastructure — there’s an army of nerds whose only job is to get you to increase your time spent on that platform,” Goetze said. “There’s a whole machine that’s trying to get you to be that way and it’s not your fault and you’re not going to win this just (through) willpower.”
Goetze also founded Physical Phones, a business that makes Bluetooth landline handsets that connect to smartphones. The product’s packaging reads “offline is the new luxury.” Goetze said the early commercial success of Physical Phones signals consumer demand for alternatives to constant device use.
Researchers and creators both point to practical steps for users looking to reduce social media time: moving app icons to less prominent locations on a phone’s home screen, disabling notifications, and avoiding bringing phones into bedrooms or other spaces where habitual use tends to occur. Anderson described these as “light touch interventions.”
“Social media will always play a part in our lives,” Goetze said. “If we can get the average screen time down from, if it’s 10 hours for a person to one hour, or from three hours to 30 minutes, that is going to be a net positive benefit for that individual and for society.”