Category: Opinion – Society

by Maria Mantini ’26 on March 19, 2026

As I approach the end of college, the benefits of social media have become even more apparent. My mother graduated from Providence College in 1988, and while she remains in touch with her close friends to this day, it was measurably more difficult for them to keep track of each other. With no cell phones, email, or internet, they would receive an occasional letter or phone call to check in as everyone started their new careers and next steps. There are some members of her graduating class that she has only recently reconnected with on Facebook or at reunions.

On the other hand, most people in our generation have had access to social media since their early teen years. When opening up Instagram, I still have posts that will pop up from people I went to middle school with, or a post on someone’s story will prompt me to reach out to someone I haven’t spoken with in a few years. Gen Z is among the first to have connections that span from childhood to adulthood in this way.

Despite the benefits this connectivity offers, I often find myself going down the rabbit hole of entertaining content made by people I don’t know instead of looking at posts from friends. If I have 10 free minutes before heading to my next class, it is all too enticing to open up the Explore Page on Instagram and choose from a screen full of videos curated to my specific interests, all but a small amount of which are posted by people I do not know and do not follow.

Finding that most of my time online was eaten up by looking through posts that offered nothing more than 30 seconds of entertainment, I decided to give up my Explore Page for Lent. Maybe if I were unable to mindlessly click through videos, I would spend more time interacting with friends, both on and offline.

However, within the first few days of Lent, I realized that I did not miss my Explore Page, but not for the reason I had hoped. While I didn’t have the option to look over and click on the posts that I wanted, my feed was essentially offering me the same content; all I had to do was just keep scrolling. As I open the app now and take a look at my feed, out of the first 10 posts, three are accounts I follow, three are ads, and four are posts marked “suggested for you.” The category with the largest percentage of space in my feed is posts that Instagram deemed I might like, not anything that I am choosing to look at.

Of course, the rationale behind this discovery is simple: the more people see content they like, the more they keep scrolling, and the more they keep scrolling, the more space there is to sell to advertisers. Instagram makes the majority of its money by gathering engagement from its users, which is why it is free to make an account. I am sure most have heard of the algorithm used by social media companies to analyze your engagement with content and give you suggestions that will keep you scrolling. Everything, down to the order of the posts on your screen, is arranged intentionally to fuel engagement.

That is not to say that these algorithms are entirely bad. Suggested content has allowed users to discover new recipes, activities, and helpful accounts they would have never otherwise come across. When suggested content has become the vast majority of our feeds, though, I argue it is time to call it into question. While I do not claim to fully understand the way social media algorithms work, I can say for certain that these companies are taking into account the way you interact with their platform. Next time you look at your feed, consciously notice what you are being shown and make a choice about what you want to interact with. Trying to fully shape your feed is a losing battle, but every move you make online is a message to tech companies about what you want to see.