← Educate Yourself

What to Do

Three tiers, from what you can do tonight to what changes the system. Individual action alone is not enough; only structural change reaches the machine itself. 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 (Roozenbeek, van der Linden and colleagues, 2022) shows that knowing how a manipulation technique works makes you significantly more resistant to it. This site tries to do the same in prose, though those interventions have been tested and this site has not. 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.

Be careful what you subscribe to. A subscription or a follow is a small act, but it compounds: each one you give a creator adds to the number that sets their influence and their revenue, and tells the ranking to show them to more people. Subscribe deliberately — to the sources you chose in the step above — and unsubscribe from what you only watch because it keeps appearing.

Phone-free bedrooms. For yourself and for children in your household: the research most consistently supports this single change. Of the pathways proposed from heavy social media use to worse mental health — a causal link that is itself contested — sleep is the best documented: a meta-analysis of 20 studies (Carter and colleagues, 2016) found that a device used at bedtime, or merely present in the bedroom, is associated with too little sleep (the research). A phone in a different room at night removes the pull.

Use privacy settings and tools that reduce tracking. A tracker blocker such as uBlock Origin. The tracking protection already built into browsers like Firefox and Safari. The privacy settings on your phone — Apple's App Tracking Transparency, Android's permission controls. A reputable VPN to mask your IP address and location. None of this is a complete solution — the RTB auction happens at the server level regardless — but together they meaningfully reduce the data available to profile you. The Tools page lists specific, trusted options.

Turn off notifications. The notification is a variable reward mechanism: its job is to bring you back to the platform, whether or not what it announces matters to you. Turn them off for social media specifically.

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 shows the techniques from the inside, which an explanation can only describe. The Netflix series Adolescence, watched together and discussed, is a natural way for parents of teenagers to open the subject.

Advocate for phone-free schools. The evidence is encouraging but not settled. The fair reading is that bans help with focus, reduce in-school use, and probably help with bullying, but are not on their own a mental-health fix: a Norwegian study found less bullying and better outcomes for girls, and a large English study found no difference in wellbeing (the studies are on the Educators page). If your child's school does not have a policy, parental backing 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. Groups working on platform accountability, algorithmic transparency and democratic resilience — their work scales in ways individual action does not. The Organisations page is the list, with what each one does and how they differ.

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 levers at this level sit with legislators and regulators rather than with users: algorithmic transparency and independent audits, liability for harmful design, age verification, impact assessments before deployment, and data access for researchers. The For Lawmakers page sets out what each one does today and who argues what about it. Writing to a representative is the ordinary way a constituent raises one of them. The OECD counted countries with social media age restrictions in force or under consideration rising from one to twelve to twenty-five in sixteen months — though by April 2026 only three had a law actually in force. Political will moves fast when it moves.

Deeper — why the tiers run this way, and why individual action isn't enough +

The order runs from the immediate to the decisive — what you can change tonight first, what changes the system last — and the leverage runs the other way. That 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 the structural steps carry the most weight even though they come last and feel least 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.

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