Why you should urgently consume less news

Well-informed citizens are essential for democracies. You, on the other hand, say: Too much information harms our democratic societies. Why?

Because we humans don’t cope well with information overload. We evolved thousands of years ago, sitting around the fire and listening to someone in the group telling a story. Today we are flooded with information 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. None of us can process this cognitively. None of us manage to absorb everything we could know – there are more scientific articles published in my field than I can ever read.

So we have to filter and select. And the problem is that we humans are not good at it. When we are overwhelmed with information, our cognitive system shuts down and looks for shortcuts. This means, for example, that we only pay attention to information that we already know or that fits our beliefs. We don’t even look at anything that we don’t like or that doesn’t agree with our opinions. And that’s problematic, especially in a democracy where we should be dealing with conflicting views – because that’s part of the democratic process.

But was it really different 30 years ago? Didn’t we just live in opinion bubbles and read exactly the newspapers that confirmed our view of the world?

Yes, but all the newspapers with their different political leanings had gatekeepers – they had editors with professional standards and quality control. That’s what’s missing on the internet now, TikTok or X have no quality control; that makes a huge difference. That’s one thing.

And the other thing is that back then everyone watched the same television program because there were only a few channels. This forced television stations to reflect a broader range of opinions; they could not focus on a specific market segment. Today nothing unites us anymore, viewers have their own favorite television program – and it serves their views.

The more information floods us, the more stressed we are, the less open we are to other opinions. Is the connection also true the other way around: the more relaxed we are, the more open we are to different views?

Yes, our research shows that. The higher the cognitive load, the more we search for information that confirms us. We are also becoming worse at distinguishing between true and false. People are usually not perfect at distinguishing true from false information. But when they have time to think about something, they’re pretty good at it. They lose this ability under time pressure. Our attention is then also attracted to negativity.

We want to recognize bad news quickly in order to survive, so to speak?

Yes, it is a fear reaction. And as a result, we focus on shocking facts, on provocative statements, on populist claims.

We see all of this on an individual level, but also on a global level, for example when we look at the half-life of Twitter hashtags: between 2013 and 2016, the half-life fell by 32 percent – that’s a lot. And heaven knows how short it is today. The US kidnaps the Venezuelan president – ​​what? Next news, Epstein files, great excitement, next information, snow disaster, next message… This reduces responsibility, no politician has to justify something for more than half a day because everything has already been forgotten by the afternoon.

Remember the Washington Post slogan, Democracy dies in DarknessDemocracy dies in darkness. If I follow you, it should be changed, right?

The slogan is of course not wrong, darkness is also bad for a democracy. But the biggest problem we have right now is the bright, blinking lights of new information flashing on our smartphones every five milliseconds, trying to get our attention. This makes it almost impossible to hold politicians accountable – Venezuela is already a thing of the past.

This tight timing did not exist before social media. In the 1980s, the Iran-Contra affair dragged on for months. Watergate? For years! Nobody talked about anything else. Today? Hours. And that for simple cognitive reasons. It’s not just politics. It’s in our heads too.

Is a certain political fatigue also related to this? Are we tired because we have to process too much information?

It wouldn’t surprise me – but I don’t have any specific data on this connection. People are tired of politics for different reasons, probably no single reason. But too much political news is part of it, I think. And when everything is too much, people turn to simple explanations like “the refugees are to blame”.

When I get up in the morning and think about what news I should consume today – how do I decide?

First of all: limit your input, limit the amount of information you consume. Say goodbye to the feeling of having to know everything, be aware of everything. You can’t do that. They’re going crazy.

If you watch TV: The public television channels in Germany are damn good. I have lived in eight different countries and I can tell you: German news programs are first class.

I personally consume a lot of news via social media and choose sources that I can trust, academics that I know, commentators who provide a lot of different information.

If you live in the UK: Avoid the tabloids, the tabloids. 90 percent of their content is clickbait, bait designed to feed their outrage. And two weeks later the newspapers have to apologize for it because it was a lie anyway. So why should you even read it?

You and your team have developed a checklist to help identify trustworthy messages. What rules should we put next to our smartphone?

A very simple rule: avoid polarizing content. If a headline contains a lot of words that are intended to excite us – terrorism, lying press, dictatorship of opinion – then you should not read any further. The language suggests that there is poor quality information under such a heading. Low quality leaves fingerprints, and a fingerprint is excessive emotionality.

So should I say: the more a headline feeds my feelings and possibly confirms my views – the less I should read the text underneath?

To be honest: yes. We published a study showing that people are persuaded by things that suit their personality. So, you’re right: if something reads like it feels too good to be true – just don’t read it.

Most of us have shorter attention spans than we used to. And I know many people who complain that they have difficulty concentrating on longer texts or getting lost in a thought. Do you think there will be a peak of junk information and then a return of slow news, a real one Slow-News-Movement?

Yes, there will be one Slow-Information-Give movement as there is Slow-Food– movement there. And it will probably grow. And yet the number of people – relative to the total population – who consciously want to learn information slowly will be small.

Because the real problem is the attention economy. Tech companies’ platforms make trillions of dollars selling our attention. And they can only do that if they keep us on their platforms for as long as possible. So they present us with captivating content that is usually of really poor quality. This is the tragedy of the attention economy. As long as we don’t change the business model, it will continue like this – people will be sucked into bad content so that others can make money from it.

Won’t it just take time until we regulate certain business models and make them less harmful? Cars had existed for over a hundred years until they all had airbags as standard, cigarettes were sold cheaply for a long time until smoking was banned in public spaces.

One could argue: Yes, it is only a matter of time before we regulate social media more closely. But the difference to the car and cigarette industries is: With social media and its algorithms, we have a product that controls people’s daily behavior. And it changes us cognitively. Cars didn’t control our behavior. Social media doesn’t provide you with a service – a car transports you from A to B. But algorithms make decisions for you, and the information you receive is governed by processes over which we have no control. My concern is: The tech platforms are manipulating us to the point that we turn against regulations that would actually liberate us.

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