I love starting my day nestled in bed, a cup of steaming second flush Darjeeling tea in one hand, my phone in the other. I need to tune in to the day and check on events that may have changed the world while I was asleep. With World War III on, that could be quite a lot
I see, on top of the line-up in my feed on YouTube, a live feed running from a news organization we’ve all grown up with in India. There’s the face of Donald Trump - again - and in big red screaming letters, the word Emergency. My body goes taut and I sit up in alarm as I start to watch the video. What’s happened now:?
As it turns out, nothing. Absolutely nothing. In the real world, the usual back and forth was still on between Iran and the US. In the video ran a months-old speech from Trump threatening something or the other. It took me some wasted minutes to realize this was old recycled news, there for the clicks. I turned it off in disgust and gave up on the news and opted for some cute cats instead.
I’m certainly not the only one to be feeling utterly exhausted with giving my attention over to greedy algorithms.
Verification fatigue
As it is, the 24/7 news cycle is quite tiring. On the one hand, there’s the fear of missing out, and on the other, the news is worse than bad, especially in the present times when something taking place elsewhere nevertheless directly impacts each person everywhere.
On top of that, one is constantly manipulated into clicking on content that isn’t really fresh news but repackaged old news to heighten sensationalism or ‘rage bait’ users by covering subjects guaranteed to arouse anger and resentment.
The number of friends I have who just don’t follow any news is increasing. On mentioning something that’s in the news, I’m often asked what’s wrong with me - why am I even bothering to look? In 2025, the Digital News Report by Reuters Institute said that news avoidance was a very real and growing phenomenon. Not surprisingly, when you think about how badly user trust will decline when one is constantly tricked into wasting time and emotion exploring non-news.
Fight-back strategies
There are a few tricks that could work for now, if you want to stay up to date with what is happening without diving into content designed to keep algorithms happy while you tear your hair out. These may be a temporary set of strategies because AI changes content rapidly nowadays, but use what helps.
Get AI to fix it: Ironic though it may be, when you come across a piece of news or video that you really want to explore but at the same time suspect, drop its link into one of the AI chatbots and ask a question about it. When did this happen? What is the impact of this news, and so on? You don’t want to work too hard over this, as the whole idea is to stop wasting time, so keep it short and quick and only get into further questioning if it interests you strongly.
I use this strategy quite often, and only once did it fail me when it said no to something that had happened. I asked it to elaborate and it admitted it was wrong and that the event had in fact happened. But this isn’t so common and you learn to spot it. It’s less stressful than checking out something only to find you’ve been manipulated.
Ask YouTube: A new feature coming to YouTube, where so many of us end up consuming news, will allow you to really narrow down what you watch and will let you ask about a video outside of a video.
For now, look for the Gemini button under most videos and use it to ask something. Now this feature answers questions using the video and its transcripts, so it won’t confirm anything outside of it. But you can ask when an event took place, what the emergency is, etc. One short, sharp question. I see so many that claim Trump collapsed, so I ask where and when he collapsed, only to be told that it isn’t covered in the video. I then know I should move on and that the world is not on fire — mostly. Rather than feeling you’ve been played, this makes you feel you outwitted the video channel and creator, which serves them right for click-baiting.
Keep to your choice: An important strategy for both written news and video is to collect a handful of sources that you trust implicitly and go to them rather than allowing them to be thrown at you every day. This is like reading your newspaper and shouldn’t feel unfamiliar. The danger is that you will live in an echo chamber in which your own views and looped back at you all the time, which ultimately is too restrictive, so add or explore other sources, but by searching for them rather than being gobbled up by your feed full of so-called personalised recommendations.
The stronger the emotion a news item or other content evokes, the more important it is to deploy one of these strategies, or any other similar ones you can come up with. I know I definitely enjoy my morning tea a little more, knowing the emergency in question was actually last Tuesday.
The New Normal: The world is at an inflexion point. Artificial intelligence (AI) is set to be as massive a revolution as the Internet has been. The option to just stay away from AI will not be available to most people, as all the tech we use takes the AI route. This column series introduces AI to the non-techie in an easy and relatable way, aiming to demystify and help a user to actually put the technology to good use in everyday life.
Mala Bhargava is most often described as a ‘veteran’ writer who has contributed to several publications in India since 1995. Her domain is personal tech, and she writes to simplify and demystify technology for a non-techie audience.