Can We All Stop Writing Fear Porn (Please)?

Is the intention to educate, or is it more Ukraine doombait written to get views?

For two years, we have been flooded with endless doom and gloom.

COVID was here to destroy the world. Every time we looked like heading out of the COVID spiral, a new variant would emerge.

And this seemed to excite some writers, commentators, and epidemiologists. Because their livelihood relied on fear.

Bad news sells.

And now it seems lots of writers and “amateur experts” are doing the same with Ukraine. But what is their motive?

Doomscrolling

In December, I prepared to head overseas for the first time in two years. My partner hadn't seen her family in that period, and we were excited to travel finally.

Then Omicron came.

My day became consumed with reading updates on this new super, vaccine-busting, mega variant. I spent hours searching the relevant hashtags on Twitter, worried that our trip would be canceled yet again.

I soon saw a pattern.

Several people seemed to take delight in spreading fear. As numbers rose, they gloated with an “I told you so,” reminding us it would get worse. Much, much worse.

If a report with a glimmer of positivity was posted, they quickly shut it down. It was like they owned shares in Omicron and wanted it to spread. Their tweets became more viral than the virus itself.

Some of their information was very important — and accurate — but the way they seemed to take pride in the reemergence of COVID was bizarre.

In the end, I had to block a few of them as I became obsessed with their negative updates, and they were making me anxious.

Fear porn

Fear porn is media content “that deliberately and enticingly plays on people’s fears about disaster, disease, and death.”

And it is becoming more prominent.

A technique called sentiment mining assesses an article's emotional tone. Data scientist Kalev Leetaru applied sentiment mining to every article published in the New York Times between 1945 and 2005, as well as an archive of translated articles from 130 countries.

It shows an interesting trend.

From the early 1960s, the New York Times got gloomier before a brief respite in the early 1970s. However, it has sunk into a progressively worse mood ever since then. The same study showed that across the world showed, news has gotten more negative over time.

Our brain is drawn to negativity

Researchers Marc Trussler and Stuart Soroka ran an experiment at McGill University in Canada.

The volunteers were asked to select some political stories to read from a news website. The results showed participants often chose stories with a negative tone rather than neutral or positive stories. In particular, they found that people who were more interested in current affairs and politics were particularly likely to choose the bad news.

Another study found that people respond quicker to negative words.

One story showed participants a range of words on flashcards and asked them to hit a response button. When they were shown words s such as “cancer,” “bomb,” or “war,” they reacted far quicker than when the word was “baby,” “smile,” or “fun.”

They also remembered the negative words more accurately than positive words.

It seems our brain hones in on negativity.

Doing doombait drives dollars?

Ok, so we have established that people are attracted to negative news.

But now I want to ask you all a question.

Do you come to this platform to read the latest news on Ukraine or perhaps for education, entertainment, and even a brief respite from the daily doom and gloom?

For me, it is definitely the latter.

Yet I now find my feed full of people predicting the end of the world. The war is horrible; I wake each morning fearing what has happened overnight and if we have inched closer to World War III.

I read the New York Times and the BBC for an update on the war. But then I move on to other platforms for a distraction.

However, this isn't proving easy. My feed on this platform is 90% Ukraine. While some of these are very well written and look at different angles, many are using fear porn to drive views.

One big name, in particular, is churning out articles daily, and some of the information being presented is misleading. The attention-grabbing headlines are capturing views but at what cost?

While the war in Ukraine is a very important topic, I’m not sure everyone is writing about it for the right reasons. Instead, I suspect some of them are tapping into our psyche for negative news and serving up a constant platter of fear porn.

A few tips

If, like me, it is getting you down, here are a few tips to distract yourself from fear porn and doombait.

• Limit your media intake. It hurts to type that as a writer, but sometimes we need a break for our mental health. Especially when so many people are writing negative stories.
• Don’t be drawn into the debate over the topic if it unsettles you. I was tempted to comment on some of the expert's tweets on Omicron but knew I would be sucked in and only create more anxiety.
• Read some positive articles for balance. I like to jump onto the Good News Network to read some lighthearted, uplifting stories from around the world.

Last week, I wrote a positive article on Ukraine and my experience there with the local people. The aim was to put a smile on readers' faces and give them a different insight into Ukraine.

It was my way of joining the conversation on an important topic without preying on doom and gloom.

So, a plea to my fellow writers, can we please cut down on the fear porn articles? And if you have to write them, please write them for the right reasons. Approach it from a different angle, Sean Kernan is a writer who does this well, aiming to educate rather than terrify.

Don't become a fear pornographer just to increase your bank balance.

It’s just Dirty Doom Done Dirt Cheap.

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