Days after she ended a relationship with her boyfriend, Jasmine Barnett noticed an abrupt shift in her TikTok feed: The comedy sketches and fitness clips that she typically enjoyed were suddenly replaced by a constant churn of videos about breakups.
At first, Ms. Barnett, a 27-year-old accountant from Atlanta, welcomed the detour into heartbreak, which included deep dives on attachment styles and relationship autopsies. After several weeks, she wanted to move on but the algorithm wouldn’t let her.
Her feed had devolved into montages of weeping women and tarot card readers peddling insights into her ex’s psyche. She made several attempts to block the breakup content, she said, but it continued to reappear.
“I’m like, ‘Please, I don’t want to see this anymore because it’s making me stay in that depressive state,’” she said, recalling her predicament two years ago. “I didn’t want to feel sad anymore.”
It’s common for people in a vulnerable state after a breakup to find their social media feeds awash in such content.
You can go “no contact” with your ex, one TikToker says in an expletive-laden post, because, she says, the person you are missing is lame. Another weeps while a motivational voice-over message plays. Others sell guaranteed multistep plans for winning back an ex.
As social media companies face increasing scrutiny over addictive design features and accusations that their algorithms can feed users harmful content, mental health advocates are pointing to the platforms’ handling of breakup content as a stark example of their failure to protect users.
Steering people who have exited a relationship toward a never-ending well of breakup content, which could increase engagement by trapping them in a state of rumination and grief, can have severe consequences for their mental health and raises a host of thorny ethical questions, experts say.
“When people are going through a romantic breakup, there’s a way in which being immersed so much in the content and thinking about the person they’ve lost, over a long period of time, can make it harder for them to recover,” said Jodi Halpern, a professor of bioethics at the University of California, Berkeley, who is writing a book about grief.
The algorithm knows you are hurting.
TikTok’s algorithm is astonishingly good at figuring out its users’ preferences and offering up a tailored stream of videos to keep them engaged.
On BreakupTok, as the corner of the platform dedicated to heartbreak is known, videos include personal breakup narratives, advice on going “no contact” with former partners, post-relationship glow-ups and a mixed bag of guidance, including advice from licensed therapists and breakup coaches.
Dr. Michael Rich, the founder of the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital, said TikTok seems to have a remarkable ability to respond to emotional states, particularly during times of heightened vulnerability because of “new loneliness.” He said it was an example of an important metric for social media companies — increased engagement time — working against the mental health of the user.
TikTok cannot actually read human emotions (even though it sometimes seems as if it does). The app tracks user behaviors — including video watch times, scroll speed and whether someone likes, shares or comments — and collects the data to determine what videos the algorithm should show next.
Feeding a stream of breakup-related content to people who recently split up with a partner could cause them to interact with the app too frequently or for too long, disrupting their natural healing, Dr. Rich said. It may prolong heartache, hinder their ability to process grief and keep them from swiftly moving on.
“It’s like ripping the scab off time and again,” he said. “It’s taking you back and saying, ‘Let’s relive this in some way,’ with the guise of helping you.”
An endless scroll.
Research has shown that social media use after a breakup can be detrimental. Accidental exposure to an ex, or searching for information on that person, can lead to distress and more negative feelings while stunting emotional recovery and inhibiting personal growth. Other studies have found that even when users took steps to remove exes from their online lives, social media often resurfaced them — sometimes multiple times per day.
With breakups, experts often point to the endless nature of some social media feeds, features including notifications and “likes” that might encourage overuse and, now, the rise of chatbots reaching out to grieving users as particularly problematic and dangerous.
“Beyond breakups, these manipulative tactics to get people to overuse social media and chatbots have been associated with decreased mental health and, in youth, actual suicidal actions and severe mental health outcomes,” Dr. Halpern said.
TikTok declined to comment. The company has acknowledged in the past that some videos can “inadvertently reinforce a negative personal experience for some viewers, like if someone who’s recently ended a relationship comes across a breakup video.”
To address this, the company said in 2021 that it had designed its “For You” page to “interrupt repetitive patterns” and that it had experimented with ways to avoid recommending similar content “that may be fine as a single video but problematic if viewed in clusters.” The app also provides wellness features, like tools to limit screen time and opportunities to help people relax and unwind.
Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, said in a statement that it offered ways for people to curate recommended content, including tools that limit certain types of posts or videos or block those that use specific words — like “breakup” or “relationship” — in hashtags or captions. In December, the company announced a new tool that it said gives Instagram users more control over their algorithms, allowing people to see and edit the topics the company thinks users care about most.
YouTube declined to comment, but last year it updated its features designed to protect teenage users, including initiatives to disrupt repetitive viewing habits and highlighting reminders to take breaks.
Experts and some users, however, argue that many of these features haven’t actually kept heavy streams of breakup content out of people’s feeds and don’t go far enough to safeguard their mental health.
Are the videos helping or hurting?
Not everyone has a bad experience with breakup content on social media. Some users said in interviews that they enjoyed it because it helped normalize their experience or offered useful advice, like how to regulate their nervous system or meditate.
“I felt seen,” said Ana Ruiz, 35, of Orlando, Fla., who got out of a relationship this spring. She said that much of the content she consumed on Instagram helped her understand the flaws in her relationship and cope with the loss.
Others were more critical.
Jason Salem, who is in his late 20s, said the breakup content he watched, primarily on Instagram and YouTube, was “totally addicting.”
He said he would spend hours a day on social media, watching videos on attachment theory or content from creators, whom he called “grifters,” promising ways to fix his relationship.
“I wanted the hope,” he said.
He said that the content slowed his recovery and distracted him from focusing on what mattered to him, like work, friends and hobbies.
“It kind of prolonged my grief because of the way it’s designed,” he said. “That’s what they want it to do, so that you continue to watch their videos.”
Overall, he added, the content damaged his view of dating.
“In hindsight I realized I saw a lot of posts that were ignorant or biased but presented as fact,” he said. “They often presented pessimistic and narrow-minded views about dating, and at my lowest points, I identified with them.”
Overcoming false hope.
When someone is experiencing deep grief, the amygdala — the part of the brain that initiates the fight-or-flight response — takes over and it can be difficult to access the other parts of the brain that bring more perspective, said Jeff Guenther, a licensed therapist who posts on TikTok about breakups and relationships to nearly three million followers.
“In those moments, you’re going to seek out videos — or comfort — that make you continue to feel like something is really, really wrong,” he said. He added that continuing to feel those emotions is a way for people to stay connected with their ex.
Mr. Guenther said that there was a lot of helpful breakup content on TikTok, including from professional breakup coaches or users posting about their personal experiences. But there was also a lot of “incredibly engaging” content that he saw as unhelpful, because it placed all the fault on the ex.
“So you never really get an opportunity to grow and to evolve and to look at your part,” he said.
A lot of the content targets users in the bargaining stage of grief, when they might hold out hope that their relationship can be repaired or their ex will come back, he said. It’s a difficult phase to navigate, even for a therapist, and one in which the person is particularly susceptible to exploitative content.
Mr. Guenther tries to subtly nudge people “out of the bargaining stage,” he said, but that is not what he sees the algorithm serving, with influencers leaning into “false hope.”
“I feel like the less qualified you are, the better your breakup content tends to be,” he said. “Better as in, you know, you’ll get more engagement.”
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
The post The Breakup Loop: Why the TikTok Algorithm May Keep You Heartbroken appeared first on New York Times.
