This is an opinion piece. The views are the author’s own.
Think about how you found the last news story you read. Odds are you didn’t go looking for it. It found you, slotted into a feed between a friend’s vacation photos, a recipe video and an ad for shoes you already bought.
That’s now the main way Americans meet the news. My argument is that we’ve handed too much of that choice to software, and that taking some of it back is easier, and more rewarding, than it sounds.
The feed became the front page
The numbers are striking. In the Reuters Institute’s 2025 Digital News Report, 54% of people surveyed in the U.S. said they got news through social media and video networks, edging out TV at 50% and news websites and apps at 48%. It was the first time social and video had come out on top.
Pew Research Center finds something similar. In a survey conducted in August 2025, 53% of U.S. adults said they at least sometimes get news from social media, a share that has held roughly steady for several years. About 38% regularly get news on Facebook and 35% on YouTube. TikTok has grown fastest: 55% of TikTok users said they regularly get news there, up from 22% in 2020.
None of that is inherently bad. Social platforms surface stories and voices that traditional outlets miss. But it does mean that, for millions of people, the editor deciding what’s important today is a ranking system built mainly to keep them scrolling.
Passive reading changes what we read
When you choose a newspaper, a magazine or a website, you’re choosing a set of priorities. Someone decided that a story about your city council belonged above a celebrity breakup. You might disagree with that call, but at least you know a human made it, and you know whose judgment you’re trusting.
A feed works differently. It mixes the serious and the trivial in a single stream, ranked by signals you can’t see. Stories arrive stripped of their context, often as a screenshot or a clip, so it’s easy to absorb a headline without knowing who reported it. And because the feed never ends, there’s no moment when you’re done and informed. There’s just the next thing.
Many of us will recognize the result. Start the day with a feed and you end up knowing a little about a lot of things and not much about anything. Start with a couple of sources you picked, and you’re far more likely to actually finish an article.
“Just switch to a chronological feed” isn’t the whole answer
It’s tempting to blame the algorithm and call for a simple fix. The research is more complicated, and it’s worth being fair about it.
In a large experiment published in Science in 2023, researchers working with Meta switched more than 20,000 consenting Facebook and Instagram users to reverse-chronological feeds for three months in late 2020. People spent less time on the platforms and engaged less, which is what you’d expect. But the change had no discernible effect on their levels of political polarization or self-reported political participation over that period.
So reordering the same stream doesn’t magically make anyone better informed. That actually supports my point. The problem isn’t only the order in which things appear. It’s that the stream itself, made of whatever happens to be shared, is a poor substitute for sources you deliberately chose.
What choosing looks like
I’m not suggesting anyone quit social media or cancel their streaming apps. I’m suggesting we stop letting them be the only way in. A few habits that make a real difference:
Go to the source on purpose
Pick two or three outlets you trust, ideally including a local one, and visit them directly, through their app, a bookmark or a home-screen shortcut. Let them be your first stop, and the feed your second.
Use newsletters and RSS
Many publications offer daily email briefings that end. That’s the point: you get to the bottom and you’re done. RSS readers, which have quietly survived for more than two decades, let you follow sites in the order they publish, without anyone ranking them for you.
Follow people and outlets, not topics
When you do use social platforms, the accounts you follow by choice tend to be more useful than whatever is recommended to you. Many apps offer a following-only view; try it.
Check where a clip came from
Before sharing or getting worked up about something, take ten seconds to find the original report. If you can’t, that tells you something.
Give yourself an ending
Set a time or a number of stories, then stop. Being informed doesn’t require being constantly updated.
What the platforms could do
This shouldn’t all fall on readers. Platforms could make it far easier to choose, and none of these ideas would require reinventing anything:
- Make a following-only view easy to find and let it stick, instead of quietly resetting to the recommended feed.
- Show clearly where a news clip or screenshot came from, with a link to the original report.
- Offer natural stopping points, such as a “you’re all caught up” message, rather than an endless scroll.
- Let people see, in plain language, why a post was shown to them.
Some apps already do versions of these things. The trouble is that they’re usually buried in settings, and defaults are what most people live with. If companies believe their users are capable adults, they should let those users make the call without a scavenger hunt.
The fair objection
Some will say this is easy for people who already have the time and money for subscriptions. It’s a fair point, and paywalls are a real barrier. But plenty of good journalism is free, some public libraries offer free digital access to major papers, and newsletters cost nothing. The bigger cost is attention, and that’s something we can choose how to spend.
Others will say that algorithms are just giving people what they want. Maybe. But what we want in a tired moment at 11 p.m. isn’t always what we’d choose with a clear head in the morning. Deciding in advance where your news comes from is a way of letting the clear-headed version of you make the call.
Pick your own front page
For most of history, choosing where your news came from was an active decision. It’s become a passive one almost without anyone noticing. Taking it back doesn’t require a grand gesture, just a few bookmarks and a bit of intention.
Start small. This week, pick one national source and one local one, put them somewhere you’ll see them every morning, and read them before you open any app with an endless feed. Notice how it feels to reach the end of the news instead of the end of your patience. My bet is you’ll want to keep doing it.
The feed will still be there. It just doesn’t have to be the editor.
More on Contoh
- AI Chatbots Give a Narrower Range of Information Than a Google Search, Study Finds
- Autoplay Should Be Opt-In, for Everyone
- Take the Photo. Then Put the Phone Away.
Sources
- Nieman Lab: For the first time, social media overtakes TV as Americans’ top news source
- Reuters Institute: Digital News Report 2025 executive summary
- Pew Research Center: Social Media and News Fact Sheet
- Science: How do social media feed algorithms affect attitudes and behavior in an election campaign? (Guess et al., 2023)
- Prosocial Design Network: Reverse chronological feeds (evidence summary)