Doomscrolling

noun, verb, slang

noun, verb, slang ·Moderate ·High school level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The practice of continually reading Internet news about catastrophic events. informal, neologism, uncountable

    "Step 1 is to acknowledge the burden that doomscrolling creates for our health, Dr. Gazzaley said. “You have to realize you don’t want to live your life in a hamster wheel of complete news consumption,” he said."

  2. 2
    Continuously and aimlessly consuming any content on social media, particularly sites that utilize a scrolling format, such as Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. broadly, uncountable
Verb
  1. 1
    present participle and gerund of doomscroll form-of, gerund, participle, present
Slang
  1. 1
    Compulsively consuming negative news online. slang, internet, 2020s

    "I was doomscrolling for hours last night."

Synonyms

All synonyms
doomsurfing

Example

More examples

"I was doomscrolling for hours last night."

Etymology

From doom + scrolling, from the practice of scrolling through timelines and news feeds on a computer or mobile device; originally in a context of being dissatisfied with current socio-political conditions and headlines. Popularized and surged during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.