I talk to friends and they joke about it, like they watch terrible stuff but quickly swipe on. We watch it like it’s just another thing, part of the endless stream. In Malta almost half of teens say they can’t switch off social media and that their online habits are affecting their mood and school performance. For 47% of us aged 15 to 16, social media use is already risky enough that it interferes with daily life. You see that and you start to wonder why we aren’t talking about how much this changes us, especially when the worst kinds of content keep popping up.
There’s a real psychological idea behind this that gets talked about in media studies called desensitisation. It means that when we see violent or shocking content again and again, our emotional reaction to it decreases over time. Something that might’ve originally made you upset becomes just another image or clip in your feed. It’s not that we don’t care. It’s that we learn to push feelings aside so we don’t have to deal with them every minute of every day. And the way social media works, it just feeds us more and more content without letting us catch our breath.
But social media isn’t just about war clips. In Malta and around us it’s almost how we get our news. Around 47% of Maltese youth say it’s their primary news source, especially platforms like TikTok and Instagram where news gets mixed with memes, influencers, stories, videos. So we’re watching war scenes next to dance trends next to debates about politicians and celebrities all at the same time. That’s a lot of emotional input without any real pause button.
When you combine that with local usage patterns, it gets even more intense. Most teens here are active on social platforms like Instagram and TikTok, and many spend hours every day scrolling, posting, checking reactions, and comparing themselves with others. The data shows that almost all young social media users in the 16 to 24 age group are on Instagram, where a huge part of the content is curated to be attention-grabbing. That means we’re trained to look for emotional hits rather than slow, thoughtful engagement.
Add real world conflicts on top of that and it gets confusing. We see images from wars, protests, disasters, famine, suffering, cruelty and violence, but it’s sandwiched between trending dances and unboxing videos. This constant stream makes it easier to get overwhelmed or to feel like nothing really sticks. You watch, you scroll, you scroll again. After a while your brain starts to filter emotions out so as not to overload you. That’s the desensitisation at work. What used to shock us now barely gets more than a half-second glance. And that’s scary because it changes how we respond to human suffering.
In Malta some adults talk about regulating social media to protect kids. A political party even called for a national ban on social media for under 16s, saying childhood should be protected from digital pressure and online harm. I don’t know if banning is the right answer, but what it tells me is we’re all sensing that too much of this digital stream is bad for our heads.
And even without dramatic events like war, social media shapes how we think about the world. Constant exposure to violent or shocking content trains our brains to assume the world is more dangerous and scary than it actually is. There’s a concept called mean world syndrome where people who see a lot of violent or negative media begin to think the world is a harsher place than what they experience offline. I can see that in how people talk sometimes, always expecting the worst or assuming everything is threat and danger before it even happens.
I’ve noticed that in myself too. I used to feel emotional when I saw sad news. Now I just feel tired. Not tired in a literal sleep sense but tired of feeling so much, so quickly, so constantly. We don’t give ourselves room to process emotions anymore. Everything is there to consume, share, forget, repeat.
A lot of my classmates say they can get anxious when they don’t check their phones, or stressed if Instagram doesn’t load, or upset if a tweet isn’t liked. That’s part of this constant loop where social media becomes both the source of our news and the place we go to deal with it. In Malta we talk a lot about mental health and how important it is, but we rarely talk about how social media shapes our emotional reaction to everything that happens in the world.
I don’t think this is only a Malta problem. But being on a small island where everyone’s connected makes it a bit more intense because we share almost the same media spaces, same influencers, same trends, same news feeds. You scroll and it feels like everyone else is scrolling beside you. There’s no silence between posts, no slow moments to think or breathe.
Maybe the answer isn’t turning off social media forever. Maybe it’s learning how to use it more consciously, taking breaks, talking about what we see, and giving space to raw emotions instead of hiding them behind memes or quick posts. Maybe it’s remembering that real life doesn’t happen inside a screen, even if it feels like our brains think it does.
Social media will stay. And war and violence will keep happening somewhere in the world. But I want to believe that we can still teach ourselves to feel deeply, to react humanely, and to not let constant digital noise turn us into people who just scroll past suffering without blinking.
Because if we become desensitised, we lose something essential about being human. We lose empathy, and after all, caring about the world is the first step to fixing it.