What to Do
Three tiers, in order of impact. Individual action alone is not enough. Structural change is what fixes the problem. Both matter.
How to read this page. Tap any underlined word to see the precise term and a short definition. Expand the "Deeper" box for the evidence behind the ordering. The main text works on its own.
Tier 1: Individual
Understand the mechanism. This is not a cliché. Cambridge University research (van der Linden et al., 2022) shows that knowing how a manipulation technique works makes you significantly more resistant to it. Reading this site is itself a protective act. Play the Bad News game (getbadnews.com) to learn the six documented techniques from the inside.
Audit your own information environment. Where do you get most of your news and information? If the honest answer is "my social media feed," that is the engagement algorithm curating your reality. Identify two or three direct sources you trust — news organisations, researchers, specific journalists — and go to them directly rather than waiting for the algorithm to surface what it chooses.
Phone-free bedrooms. For yourself and for children in your household: the research most consistently supports this single change. Sleep disruption is the clearest documented pathway from social media use to mental health outcomes. A phone in a different room at night removes the pull.
Install uBlock Origin. Reduce browser-side tracking. Not a complete solution — the RTB auction happens at the server level regardless — but a meaningful reduction in the data available to profile you.
Turn off notifications. The notification is a variable reward mechanism designed to pull you back to the platform at moments of maximum psychological vulnerability. Notifications serve the platform's engagement goals, not yours. Turn them off for social media specifically.
Variable reward
A reward delivered on an unpredictable schedule: most notifications are nothing, occasionally one matters, and the uncertainty is what makes you check. Skinner showed this pattern drives more persistent behaviour than a predictable reward — the same mechanism slot machines use. Turning notifications off removes the pull at its source rather than relying on willpower to resist it.
Tier 2: Social
Have the conversation. Not a lecture — a conversation. "Have you noticed this?" "What do you think about how this works?" The Bad News game played together is more effective than any explanation. The Netflix series Adolescence watched together and discussed is one of the most effective conversations available for parents of teenagers.
Advocate for phone-free schools. Research supports school phone bans. Many head teachers want to implement them and are looking for parental backing. If your child's school does not have a policy, this is a lever worth pushing.
Share this site. Inoculation at scale requires reaching people before they encounter the manipulation techniques, not after. Sharing with someone who has not yet thought about this is genuinely useful.
Tier 3: Structural
Support the organisations doing this work. The Center for Humane Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the DROG foundation, EUvsDisinfo — organisations advocating for platform accountability, algorithmic transparency, and democratic resilience. Their work scales in ways individual action does not.
Support quality journalism. Subscribe to investigative outlets. The Haugen disclosures happened because journalists worked on them for months. Investigative journalism is expensive and commercially precarious. The organisations that produce it need financial support to continue.
Contact your representatives. The policy agenda — algorithmic transparency requirements, liability for harmful design, privacy-preserving age verification, mandatory algorithmic impact assessments — requires political support. Legislators who receive constituent communication on this issue are more likely to act on it. The OECD documented a five-fold increase in countries implementing age restrictions in 16 months: political will moves fast when it moves.
Deeper — why the tiers are in this order, and why individual action isn't enough
The ordering here is deliberate and is the same argument the rest of the site makes. The individual steps are real and worth doing — phone-free bedrooms have the most consistent evidence behind them, and inoculation (understanding the technique) measurably increases resistance. But they put the burden of response on the person rather than on the system, and that framing quietly favours the platforms: a feed refined by thousands of engineers against billions of data points is not an even contest with personal willpower.
That is why structural steps sit at the top of the impact order even though they feel less immediate. Liability for harmful design, algorithmic transparency, and enforcement of existing law (the DSA) change the system for everyone at once, in a way no personal setting can. Both tiers matter — but if you only had energy for one, the leverage is in the structural tier. Individual action makes you harder to manipulate; structural change makes the machine less manipulative.