doomscroll
Formsdoomscrolls, doomscrolling, doomscrolled
- 1To keep scrolling through negative or distressing news online, often compulsively and to one's own detriment.
Like rubbernecking at a car wreck, except the wreckage keeps refreshing on your screen.
He doomscrolled disaster coverage until well past midnight.
Teenagers often doomscroll for hours without realizing how much time has passed.
Note
A verb probably pulled backward out of a noun: doomscrolling seems to have come first, with doomscroll clipped from it, pairing doom with the ordinary scroll through a feed. It inflects regularly (doomscrolls, doomscrolled) and usually stands alone or takes about, as in you doomscroll about wars and pandemics, though it can also take a direct object. Robert West's Stop Doomscrolling (2020) already frames it as a cycle to break.
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Origin
Formed from "doom" and "scroll," probably as a back-formation from "doomscrolling."