Browsing our bias

Should we curate our feeds for community or for challenge?

Paula Duncan

Paula Duncan is a PhD candidate at the University of Aberdeen, researching OCD and faith.

A woman stands between two table, one of friends and the other more argumentative.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

“Would you like to continue using this app?”

I stare at the question on my phone screen. It’s there by design – I have it set to prompt me every five minutes so that I don’t fall into the trap of endless scrolling. Often, it’s enough to make me close the app and move on with my day.

Today, however, I’ve been doomscrolling - endlessly flicking through the discussions around the General Election. I have already told my phone I’d like to keep this social media app for another five minutes, and another five minutes, and another. I didn’t open X with any real hope of finding answers to my many questions about the upcoming election (the crucial one being: “who should I vote for?!”). From there, I’ve fallen down a rabbit hole. There is simply too much information, and I can’t always tell what is real or true. I can’t make it more than two or three posts before I stumble across yet another logical fallacy or false equivalency.

When my phone prompts me again to close the app, I pause. I have suddenly realised that I’m upset. It has taken the pop-up box on my phone to make me pause and notice that that I’m overwhelmed and helpless but I still feel like I need to speak, say something, anything useful. But maybe there is just nothing I can say. Maybe I can’t usefully add to this debate. Or perhaps I can’t usefully discuss it in this format.

There is little nuance in the discussion – people are simply yelling at one another.

I close the app to leave this angry space.

I’m not sure I have gained any real insight into the debate from this experience. I can’t help but think that many people are here only to assert their opinion. Nobody is here to listen. Nobody is here to learn. This sort of platform encourages us to speak, to be seen speaking, but doesn’t promote discussion and debate in a way that is constructive. Let alone create a safe well-lit space for it. It doesn’t take long to find someone supposedly invalidating another’s argument by pointing out a grammatical mistake. There is no grace here.

I’m wary of following or subscribing to users who have completely different viewpoints from my own because I am concerned about my own digital image.

I find this online space a difficult one to occupy. My feed is mostly friends and a couple of carefully chosen pages. There’s nothing that is going to particularly challenge me there. I don’t particularly want social media to challenge me. It’s comforting, more than anything – a way of staying in touch with friends and family (particularly during the pandemic) and keeping up to date with organisations I’m involved in.

I don’t tend to go on social media to engage in discussions or debates. I know that this leads to something of a confirmation bias. If I get all of my information from the same sources, and from the same people all the time, I’m not going to learn about other perspectives. If I follow the trade union that supports my workplace, it’s obvious that I will only receive information supporting one particular party. If the only people I follow are people who share similar views as mine, I will simply find myself with my own opinions and feelings being validated.

It’s also worth noting that, perhaps shamefully, I’m wary of following or subscribing to users who have completely different viewpoints from my own because I am concerned about my own digital image. I worry about someone opening my page and making assumptions about my views simply based on those I follow online. I know others share this concern. Public social media accounts are sometimes a delicate exercise in personal branding. I am likely confirming someone else’s bias with my social media presence. I’m almost definitely part of that cycle.

I find myself torn between wanting to use social media more effectively to learn from other people and wanting to make it literally a pastime.

There are certainly arguments to be made about whether this approach to social media is good or bad. It’s certainly comforting though. At the end of a long day, a video of my friend’s dog is going to improve my day just a little bit more than trying to pick apart the truth from the lies in social media and in politics more generally. It’s important that I remain conscious that this is the way I have chosen to use social media. I can’t be complacent.

If I engage with other perspectives and debates, I have to do so more consciously and deliberately. I try and drop in and out of those spaces through the news tabs, tags, searching specific people who I know hold different viewpoints, or looking up specific topics. It always runs the risk of falling into the trap I’ve found myself in today – scrolling through seemingly endless perspectives that I don’t agree with, people wishing harm on another for having a different perspective, a vicious “us and them” narrative that follows through every other post. I need to learn where I can find the most accurate and reliable information. More importantly, perhaps, I need to learn how to close apps when I find myself in angry spaces where debate cannot flourish (and I’m almost never going to find that in a comment section.)

Ultimately, I don’t think I’ll stop carefully curating my social media feeds – mainly as an act of self-perseveration. It’s not that I don’t care – it is never that I don’t care. Just that the 24-hour news cycle becomes too much when there is little that I can do. I’m not going to figure out who to vote for my scrolling arguments on X or Facebook.

I find myself torn between wanting to use social media more effectively to learn from other people and wanting to make it literally a pastime. There is certainly potential for learning - I can access real-time perspectives on almost anything. On the flipside, it is becoming increasingly difficult to discern what is real and what is fake news, or simply AI generated. On the flip side, sometimes I just want to find out if anyone else was as confused by the answer to a TV quiz show as I was or just see a picture of a friend’s cat sunbathing on a windowsill.

How might we find this balance? Sadly, it seems that this is a conversation that’s now only worth having offline.

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4 September 2025

3 min read

Who’d be an MP today?

A vulnerable vocation that we should all consider

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Vicar of St Michael's Chester Square, London.

MPs sit and stand in a crowded parliament.

The House of Commons sits, and stands.

Houses of Parliament.

Last year, 132 Members of Parliament headed for the exit. Of course, the reasons for this vary, but the unsustainable nature of the role must be factored in. As the Westminster Parliament returns for another session, who on earth would want to be an MP in today's day and age?

Most starkly, we saw the murders of Jo Cox and Sir David Amess, with the latter writing in 2020 that the fear of attacks "rather spoilt the great British tradition of the people openly meeting their elected politicians". Herein lies much of the issue of being an MP today: accessibility. They might be highly insulated within the Palace of Westminster, but within their phones and outside of those gates they are always available, and always on, with slings and arrows that are verbal and violent.

The combination of abuse and accessibility is a potent force. It's not limited to the MPs themselves. Dr Ashley Weinberg, an occupational psychologist from the University of Salford, said that 49.5 per cent of MPs' staff suffering from distress was double the level experienced by the general population. Those in vocation-based work need some boundaries as capes don't come with the parliamentary pass.

And if the exit sign is so alluring, how do we remove barriers to entry? In Why We Get the Wrong Politicians, Isabel Hardman writes that seeking a seat is 'the most expensive and time-consuming job interview on earth'. Only to be met by remuneration that doesn't quite make up for the package deal. Of course, there's the uber-keen. Morgan Jones, writing in The New Statesman, notes 'People who want to be MPs really want to be MPs. They are willing to try and try again: in the footnotes of the careers of many now-prominent politicians, one finds unsuccessful first tilts at parliament.'

Being adopted, working class, a mum, a carer, and a cancer survivor didn't stop Conservative MP Katherine Fletcher from standing as an MP. In fact, it all contributed to it: 'You stand on a podium and say, "Vote for me please!" To do it properly you have to bring your whole self.' The sense of calling to a vocation comes from a frustration, where she found herself yelling at the TV, intersecting with our core experiences and values.

Even with five-year terms, there's an inherent reactivity in the daily nature of being an MP. Where is the space to think? To really reflect. In a plaintive but not totally despairing summer article, Andrew Marr, the veteran observer of politics, wrote more broadly about British society: 'What is new and disorientating is that we have so few storytellers to shake us or point a way ahead… This means that we push our anxieties, our frustrated hopes and our confusion even more on to the shoulders of political leaders who are entirely unsuited to bearing the weight.' As we lack imaginative drive, 'The fault is not in our stars but in ourselves.'

We need everyone from poets to plumbers to make this society work. And there's the question of vocation: where does my gifting and passion meet the needs of our society that solves problems or inspires others to?

We rightly have high expectations of our leaders, and project our hopes and fears onto their blank canvases. But their canvasses aren't blank. They are crammed with the urgent and important. We can't expect our politicians to do and be everything - and we all need to play our part. Our blame-and-shame culture finds hysterical, theatrical representation at Prime Minister's Questions. Sir Tony Blair said that 'A private secretary would come in and say: "Well, Prime Minister, a grateful nation awaits." I would follow him out feeling as if I was going to my execution.' The agonistic, antagonistic design of the House of Commons, where one side is pitted against the other, has ripples in our society with an increasingly antagonistic public discourse.

In pointing the finger we have three pointing back at ourselves. As Jesus famously said, 'Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?'

Our vote at the ballot box may be our exercise of judgement. But before scathing our members of parliament, it's worth us first asking 'what have I done as a member of the public?'

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