EvilEye Amulet
X (Twitter) Addiction

X is an outrage machine engineered to make you angry. Here is the proof.

X's algorithm amplifies anger over every other emotion. False news spreads 70% faster than truth on the platform. The term "doom scrolling" was literally born on Twitter. This is not a side effect. It is the product working exactly as designed.

Break the Doom Scroll
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70%
False news is 70% more likely to be retweeted than true stories on X, according to MIT research published in Science
The Numbers

X by the numbers: the outrage economy.

X has evolved from a microblogging platform into the world's largest outrage amplifier. These are the numbers behind the machine that keeps you doom scrolling.

0 min
Average daily X use in the United States
SQ Magazine, 2025
0M
Monthly active users on X globally
Backlinko, 2025
0M
Tweets posted every single day on the platform
Notta, 2025
0%
Of users open the app multiple times per day
Charle Agency, 2025

From microblog to outrage machine

2006

Twitter launches as a microblogging platform

Jack Dorsey sends the first tweet. The platform is designed around 140-character messages and a simple chronological timeline. Users follow people they choose. The feed shows exactly what those people post, in order.

2016

Algorithmic timeline introduced

Twitter shifts from purely chronological to an algorithm-ranked feed. The platform begins prioritizing "relevant" tweets over recency. Engagement metrics start to determine what you see, creating the first incentive to produce emotionally charged content.

2020

"Doom scrolling" enters the lexicon

During the COVID-19 pandemic, journalist Karen Ho begins tweeting nightly reminders to "stop doom scrolling." The term, first coined on Twitter in 2018, goes mainstream. Merriam-Webster names it a "word we're watching." Twitter becomes synonymous with compulsive negative news consumption.

2022

Elon Musk acquires Twitter for $44 billion

Musk takes Twitter private, renames it X, and restructures the algorithm. The feed is split into "For You" (algorithmic) and "Following" (chronological). The algorithmic tab, modeled after TikTok's approach, becomes the default, prioritizing engagement over user preference.

2024

Musk admits the algorithm cannot tell outrage from approval

In September 2024, Musk publicly acknowledges that X's algorithm cannot distinguish between positive engagement and outrage. "If the actual reason you forwarded the content was because you were outraged by it, we are currently not smart enough to realise that," he writes. The platform has 600 million monthly active users consuming algorithmically amplified anger.

The Algorithm

How X hooks you.

X does not just show you what is happening. It shows you what will make you react. The platform has evolved into perhaps the most sophisticated outrage amplification system ever built. Here is how it works.

Outrage Amplification: Anger Gets the Algorithm's Attention

Research from Columbia, NYU, and other institutions found that X's engagement-based ranking algorithm disproportionately amplifies tweets that evoke outrage and out-group animosity. When considering only political tweets, anger was by far the predominant emotion amplified by the algorithm — both in terms of the emotions expressed by authors and the emotions felt by readers. Critically, the researchers also found that users do not prefer the political tweets selected by the algorithm, meaning X actively promotes content that makes you feel worse, not content you actually want to see.

Engagement, User Satisfaction, and the Amplification of Divisive Content on Social Media (2023); Published in PNAS, 2025

Real-Time Information Anxiety: The Need to Know Right Now

X was built around real-time information — trending topics, breaking news, "what's happening." This design exploits what psychologists call information anxiety: the persistent feeling that you might miss something important if you do not check right now. The Explore tab, push notifications for trending topics, and the social pressure of "hot takes" culture create a compulsion loop. Research from Stanford HAI found that the most biased news sources had roughly 12% more high-arousal negative content, and these posts were the most likely to go viral — meaning X's real-time information stream is systematically skewed toward the alarming.

Stanford HAI, "The Data Behind Your Doom Scroll" (2024)

The For You Feed: An Outrage-Optimized Timeline

Under Elon Musk, X's feed was split into "For You" (algorithmic) and "Following" (chronological), with the algorithmic tab as the default. This means that even if you carefully curated who you follow, X now decides what you see based on engagement signals. In September 2024, Musk himself acknowledged the core problem: the algorithm cannot distinguish between content you engage with because you like it and content you engage with because it makes you angry. "We are currently not smart enough to realise that," he admitted. The result is a feed optimized to provoke reaction, not satisfaction.

Elon Musk, public statement on X, September 2024; Social Media Today reporting

Quote Tweets and Viral Pile-Ons: Outrage as Social Currency

X's quote tweet mechanic is unique among social platforms. It lets users repost someone else's content with their own commentary attached, effectively turning disagreement into a broadcast sport. A single controversial tweet can spawn thousands of quote tweets, each adding a new layer of outrage and amplifying the original content far beyond its natural reach. A Yale study analyzing 12.7 million tweets found that users who received more likes and retweets when expressing outrage were more likely to express outrage in later posts — a social learning feedback loop where the platform literally teaches users to be angrier over time.

Brady & Crockett, "How social learning amplifies moral outrage expression in online social networks," Science Advances (2021)
If the actual reason you forwarded the content to friends was because you were outraged by it, we are currently not smart enough to realise that.
— Elon Musk, owner of X, publicly acknowledging the platform's outrage amplification problem, September 2024
The Research

What the research says about X and your brain.

This is not speculation. These findings come from MIT, Yale, Stanford, and dozens of peer-reviewed studies spanning nearly two decades of Twitter data.

Doom Scrolling and Anxiety

Doom scrolling — the compulsive consumption of negative news even when it makes you feel worse — is a behavior that was literally named after Twitter. Research published in Technology, Mind, and Behavior found that doom scrolling has positive relationships with FOMO, social media addiction, and daily hours spent on social media. Harvard Health reports that doom scrolling leads to heightened anxiety, disrupted sleep, and a distorted perception of reality. A 2023 review analyzing three separate studies involving approximately 1,200 adults found that doom scrolling is linked to worse mental well-being and lower life satisfaction. The mechanism is your brain's negativity bias: an evolutionary survival trait that makes you pay disproportionate attention to threatening information, which X's design exploits at industrial scale.

Technology, Mind, and Behavior, "Doomscrolling on Social Media Newsfeeds" (2022); Harvard Health Publishing (2024); UCSD Research on negativity bias
1.91x
People are 1.91 times more likely to share negative news articles on social media

Political Polarization Is Algorithmically Caused

A 2024 study during the U.S. presidential campaign used a browser extension to alter X's algorithm for 1,256 volunteers. The results provided causal evidence: when X's feed amplifies hostile, emotionally aggressive political content, people become colder toward the opposing side. When that content is pushed down, they warm up. This is not correlation — it is direct causation. The algorithm is not reflecting polarization. It is creating it. A separate study on X's user base found that right-leaning accounts experienced the highest exposure inequality, while both left- and right-leaning accounts encountered amplified exposure to politically aligned users and reduced exposure to opposing viewpoints.

Science Media Centre, "Independent research shows that X's algorithm can influence political polarisation" (2024); FAccT Conference, "Auditing Political Exposure Bias" (2025)
1,256
Volunteers proved that X's algorithm causally increases political polarization

False News Spreads 70% Faster Than Truth

A landmark 2018 MIT study published in Science analyzed approximately 126,000 stories tweeted by 3 million people more than 4.5 million times between 2006 and 2017. The results were unambiguous: false news stories are 70% more likely to be retweeted than true stories. It takes true stories about six times as long to reach 1,500 people as it does for false stories. Falsehoods reach a cascade depth of 10 about 20 times faster than facts. The researchers found that humans, not bots, are primarily responsible — because false news tends to be more novel, and people are more likely to share novel information. X's design amplifies this by rewarding engagement regardless of accuracy.

Vosoughi, Roy & Aral, "The spread of true and false news online," Science (2018); MIT Sloan School of Management
6x
Longer for true stories to reach 1,500 people compared to false ones on X

The Platform Teaches You to Be Angrier

A Yale University study led by William Brady and Molly Crockett analyzed 12.7 million tweets from 7,331 Twitter users. They found that users who received more likes and retweets when expressing outrage were more likely to express outrage in later posts. This is social learning: the platform's reward system literally trains users to produce angrier content over time. Critically, the researchers found that members of politically moderate networks were actually more influenced by these social rewards than extremists. This suggests a mechanism for how moderate people get radicalized: X's engagement incentives create positive feedback loops that gradually escalate outrage expression.

Brady, Wills, Jost, Tucker & Van Bavel, "How social learning amplifies moral outrage expression in online social networks," Science Advances (2021)
12.7M
Tweets analyzed by Yale researchers showing outrage is learned through social rewards

Your Brain Is Wired to Keep Scrolling Bad News

Research from UCSD explains that humans have a negativity bias — an evolutionary survival trait that drives more attention to threatening or bad information. Negative images and news tend to spark more brain activity than positive information. A cross-national study across 17 countries published in PNAS found that people show stronger psychophysiological reactions to negative news than positive news, confirming this bias is universal, not cultural. A 2024 study in Nature found that negative news articles are 1.91 times more likely to be shared on social media. X's infinite scroll, trending topics, and breaking-news-first design turn this evolutionary vulnerability into a compulsion loop.

PNAS, "Cross-national evidence of a negativity bias in psychophysiological reactions to news" (2019); Nature Scientific Reports (2024); UCSD Today
17
Countries confirmed the human negativity bias in a cross-national PNAS study
Platform Comparison

X's addiction is different. It is angrier.

While X may have lower average screen time than TikTok, its psychological impact is disproportionate. The emotional intensity of outrage-driven content means 34 minutes on X can leave you more anxious than 95 minutes on TikTok.

TikTok 95 min/day
YouTube 49 min/day
X (Twitter) 34 min/day
Instagram 33 min/day
Facebook 31 min/day
Snapchat 30 min/day
Sources: Backlinko 2025, SQ Magazine 2025, Statista 2024, DataReportal 2024
Social media platforms create incentives that change how users react to political events over time. They do not merely reflect what is happening in society. They shape it.
— Yale University researchers, Science Advances (2021)

What makes X uniquely harmful

TikTok keeps you scrolling with entertainment. Instagram keeps you scrolling with social validation. X keeps you scrolling with outrage and anxiety. The distinction matters because research shows that anger-based engagement has qualitatively different effects on your brain than entertainment or social comparison. A study from the European Commission found that social media is literally making us angrier, with platform design amplifying moral outrage through reward mechanisms. X's combination of real-time news, algorithmic amplification of anger, quote-tweet pile-ons, and trending topics creates a uniquely toxic cocktail. You may spend less time on X than on TikTok, but the minutes you do spend are more emotionally damaging because they are saturated with outrage, conflict, and negativity.

CORDIS, European Commission, "Social media making us angrier, study reveals" (2021); Brady & Crockett, Yale University

The Information Trap

X makes you think you are informed. You are just anxious.

The most insidious thing about X is that it disguises compulsive behavior as staying informed. You are not learning about the world. You are doom scrolling through a feed algorithmically optimized to make you feel like the world is ending.

The Illusion of Being Informed

X creates the feeling that you are staying on top of events. But research from Stanford HAI shows that the most biased, highly arousing negative content is the most likely to go viral. What reaches your feed is not a representative picture of reality — it is a distortion optimized for emotional reaction. You finish a 30-minute session feeling like the world is worse than it actually is, because the algorithm showed you the most alarming version of every story.

Stanford HAI, "The Data Behind Your Doom Scroll" (2024)

The FOMO Compulsion

Research published in Technology, Mind, and Behavior found that doom scrolling has a strong positive relationship with FOMO — fear of missing out. X exploits this by surfacing trending topics, breaking news notifications, and the constant churn of hot takes. The platform trains you to believe that if you are not checking X, you are missing something important. The cognitive cost is persistent low-grade anxiety, even when you are not on the app, because your brain knows there might be news it has not processed yet.

Technology, Mind, and Behavior, "Doomscrolling on Social Media Newsfeeds" (2022)

The Hot Takes Trap

X rewards speed over thoughtfulness. When news breaks, the race to post the first reaction creates a culture of instant hot takes that prioritize emotional intensity over accuracy or nuance. The Yale outrage study found that users learn to express more outrage over time because the platform rewards it. The result is a feedback loop: events happen, users race to produce the most emotionally charged reaction, the algorithm amplifies the angriest takes, and the cycle escalates — training your brain to default to outrage as its primary mode of processing information.

Brady & Crockett, Yale University, Science Advances (2021)

Negative Content Is Stickier in Your Brain

A cross-national study spanning 17 countries and 6 continents, published in PNAS, confirmed that the human brain has a universal negativity bias: people show stronger psychophysiological reactions to negative news than positive news. This is not cultural — it is biological. X's design weaponizes this by ensuring your feed is disproportionately negative, because negative content generates more engagement, which signals to the algorithm to show more of it. The result is a negativity spiral that your evolutionary wiring makes nearly impossible to resist through willpower alone.

PNAS, "Cross-national evidence of a negativity bias in psychophysiological reactions to news" (2019)

The Echo Chamber Effect

A 2024 study by Pew Research Center found that Democrats and Republicans have dramatically shifted their platform usage since Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter. Research auditing X's algorithm found it skews exposure toward high-popularity users, with both left- and right-leaning accounts encountering amplified exposure to politically aligned users and reduced exposure to opposing viewpoints. A 2018 PNAS study had already shown that exposure to opposing views on Twitter can actually increase political polarization rather than reduce it. X does not just create echo chambers — it calcifies them, making users more certain and more hostile over time.

Pew Research Center (2025); FAccT Conference (2025); PNAS, "Exposure to opposing views on social media can increase political polarization" (2018)
The Solution

Breaking the doom scroll does not require willpower.

X's addiction loop is powered by three forces: frictionless access (one tap and you are in), your brain's negativity bias (you cannot look away from threats), and algorithmic amplification (the feed gets more outrageous the more you engage). Willpower alone cannot fight biology plus billion-dollar engineering. EvilEye fights it with friction.

The doom scrolling loop on X works because checking the app is effortless. Your thumb opens it before your conscious mind even registers what is happening. You intended to check one thing and 20 minutes later you are reading rage-inducing quote tweets about a topic you did not care about when you woke up. The pattern is identical every time: reflexive open, algorithm serves outrage, negativity bias hooks you, time vanishes.

EvilEye interrupts the very first step. The smile requirement is not arbitrary — research on embodied cognition shows that the physical act of smiling shifts your emotional and cognitive state. When you are about to doom scroll out of anxiety or boredom, pausing to smile activates a fundamentally different neural pathway. You move from the reactive, threat-scanning mode that X exploits to a conscious, deliberate state. That two-second shift is enough to break the chain.

1

Smile to Interrupt

When you reflexively reach for X to check trending topics or see what outrage is happening now, EvilEye catches you. Before the app opens, it requires a genuine smile using your iPhone's TrueDepth camera. This two-second pause breaks the anxious, reactive pattern that powers doom scrolling. You shift from scanning for threats to making a choice.

2

Choose Your Time

After smiling, you decide how long you want X unlocked. Five minutes to check a specific thread? Fifteen minutes to catch up on news? The choice is yours. The critical difference is that you are setting a boundary before the algorithm has a chance to hook you. X removes stopping cues. EvilEye puts one in before you even start.

3

Stay Protected

When your chosen time expires, EvilEye steps back in. No willpower drain. No internal negotiation about "just five more minutes." The app locks and the doom scroll ends. Over time, the number of reflexive X checks decreases because your brain learns there is a pause waiting — and that pause is often enough to make you realize you did not actually need to open X at all.

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FAQ

X addiction: your questions answered.

Yes. Doom scrolling is a compulsive behavior driven by the brain's negativity bias — an evolutionary trait that makes us pay more attention to threatening or negative information. Research published in Technology, Mind, and Behavior found that doom scrolling has positive relationships with FOMO, social media addiction, and daily hours spent on social media. X's design amplifies this through infinite scroll, real-time trending topics, and an algorithm that prioritizes emotionally charged content. A 2024 study from Nature found that negative news articles are 1.91 times more likely to be shared on social media, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of negative content on platforms like X.
Research published in 2023 by scholars from Columbia, NYU, and other institutions found that Twitter's engagement-based ranking algorithm amplifies emotionally charged, out-group hostile content. When considering only political tweets, anger was by far the predominant emotion amplified by the algorithm, both in terms of the emotions expressed by authors and the emotions felt by readers. Critically, the study also found that users do not prefer the political tweets selected by the algorithm, meaning the algorithm promotes content that makes people feel worse, not content they actually want to see. In September 2024, Elon Musk himself acknowledged this problem.
Research strongly links excessive social media use, including X, to anxiety and depression. A 2023 review analyzing three studies involving approximately 1,200 adults found that doom scrolling is linked to worse mental well-being and life satisfaction. Harvard Health reports that doom scrolling leads to heightened anxiety, disrupted sleep, and a distorted perception of reality. Research from UCSD explains that our brains have a negativity bias that makes negative information stickier, meaning the constant stream of alarming content on X can create a persistent state of low-grade anxiety even after you put the phone down.
Yes. A landmark 2018 MIT study published in Science analyzed approximately 126,000 stories tweeted by 3 million people more than 4.5 million times between 2006 and 2017. The researchers found that false news stories are 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true stories. It takes true stories about six times as long to reach 1,500 people as it does for false stories. Falsehoods reach a cascade depth of 10 about 20 times faster than facts. The study found that humans, not bots, are primarily responsible for this spread — because false news tends to be more novel, and people are more likely to share novel information.
Research demonstrates that X's algorithm causally increases political polarization. A 2024 study using 1,256 volunteers during the U.S. presidential campaign found that when X's feed amplifies hostile, emotionally aggressive political content, people become colder toward the opposing side — and when that content is pushed down, they warm up. A Yale study analyzing 12.7 million tweets found that users who received more likes and retweets when expressing outrage were more likely to express outrage in later posts, creating a feedback loop. Politically moderate users were actually more influenced by these social rewards, suggesting a mechanism for how moderate groups become radicalized over time.
While platforms like TikTok exploit entertainment-based dopamine loops and Instagram exploits social validation, X uniquely exploits your brain's negativity bias and need to stay informed. X addiction is rooted in outrage engagement, real-time information anxiety, and doom scrolling. The platform's design around short-form text reactions, quote tweets, trending topics, and breaking news creates a compulsion to constantly check what is happening and react to it. Research shows that X users spend an average of 34 minutes per day on the platform in the U.S., but the psychological impact is disproportionate to time spent because of the emotional intensity of the content consumed.
Yes. EvilEye is designed to interrupt the reflexive checking behavior that X exploits. Before you can open X, EvilEye requires you to smile into your front camera using your iPhone's TrueDepth sensor. This creates a pause that shifts you from the reactive, anxious state that drives doom scrolling to a more conscious, deliberate state. You then choose how long you want X unlocked. This friction-based approach directly counters X's frictionless design that enables compulsive checking. Instead of reflexively opening X to check trending topics or respond to outrage, you make a deliberate decision each time.
X was built around real-time information — trending topics, breaking news, and "what's happening." This creates what researchers call information anxiety: the feeling that you might miss something important if you do not check constantly. The platform reinforces this through push notifications for trending topics, the Explore tab showing what is happening now, and the social pressure of hot takes culture where reacting quickly to events is rewarded with engagement. Research from Stanford HAI found that the most biased news sources had roughly 12 percent more high-arousal negative content than balanced sources, and these highly arousing negative posts were most likely to go viral — meaning X's information stream is systematically skewed toward alarming content.

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EvilEye Amulet

X was designed to make you react.
EvilEye was designed to make you choose.

You now know how X's algorithm amplifies outrage, how false news spreads faster than truth, and how the platform literally teaches you to be angrier over time. The only question left is whether you will keep doom scrolling on autopilot — or take conscious control.

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