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Generation Z is uploading videos of their work routines to TikTok and Instagram, and it is already a phenomenon

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If we have learned anything from social networks, it is that everything can be contained, including boring office work. After all there are people hooked on toilet cleaning videosso it’s not that strange. Worktok. It’s how these creators, most of them very young, tag the content they publish about their work. Browsing the hashtag we found mostly humorous gags about work life, but digging a little deeper we found all kinds of videos. There are those who tell their routine, those who use it as a space to vent to complain about their bosses and even those who broadcast his dismissal live. There is a subcategory within this trend and it is the ‘Quittok’, that is, young people who tell why they want to resign from their jobs. Some they even record themselves doing it. Viral. It is not an anecdotal phenomenon, the hashtag #worktok It has already accumulated almost 300,000 publications and the total views amount to 1.8 billion. What has led so many people to share details about their work life? The label began to become popular in 2020 during the pandemic. At a time when teleworking was imposed throughout the world, many people began to share their daily lives on TikTok and that also included work. Why is it important. In statements to the BBCAccording to Sara McCorquodale, head of an influencer firm in the United Kingdom, the fact that it has been maintained over time responds to a need to create a community and seek validation online. It’s like looking for that “coffee machine moment” that for many young people does not exist either because they work remotely or because they do not have that connection with their office colleagues. A space of identity. According to McCorquodale, sharing with the world the day-to-day life of work – with its achievements and its dramas – is also a way of reaffirming one’s identity and taking control of the narrative. It is a way of saying that my work life belongs to me and I am going to narrate it as I want, not as the company dictates. It is also a symptom of a broader trend, that of a generation that prioritizes their mental health and well-being over promotions or working hard. They are the opposite of workaholics. Yes, but. Sharing certain company details or recording videos during working hours can cause problems. It’s what It happened to a paint store worker who started recording videos of how he mixed different colors of paint. The company saw the videos and fired him for recording during work hours and using store materials. Primark also fired an employee in the United Kingdom for having recorded TikToks. It doesn’t seem like ‘worktok’ is going to disappear, so both companies and employees will have to adapt and navigate without crossing boundaries. In Xataka | A generation totally disconnected from their work: 80% of “genzers” want to change jobs Image | Vitaly Gariev in Unsplash

Instagram wants you to be able to gossip about your ex’s stories without getting caught. Paying, of course

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Instagram stories they turn ten years old soon and the company is preparing a novelty that could completely change this product. The format, popularized by Snapchat, has some basic “rules”, such as that they disappear after 24 hours and that we can know who has seen our story. Instagram suggests that we can bypass these and other rules if we pay a subscription. Instagram Plus. This is what this new subscription model will be called, as they say in TechCrunch. Meta is testing a paid subscription for Instagram that will allow users to enjoy a series of benefits over normal features. Currently, Instagram has the Meta Verified subscription option (to have the blue tick) aimed at creators, but this new subscription is aimed at normal users who want to have certain benefits. Meta’s goal with this move is to diversify Instagram’s sources of income, which mainly come from advertising. Functions for the stalking. In an email to TechCrunch, Meta has detailed what extra features will come with the subscription. It is striking that the majority of functions fuel, let’s say, unhealthy uses of the platform, just when Meta has been found guilty of having designed its products to generate addiction. The functions of Instagram Plus are as follows: View stories anonymously, without the person who posted them knowing. Know which people have viewed your story more than once. Search within the list of viewers, to find out if a specific person has seen your story without having to search the list Extend the length of stories for an additional 24 hours. Feature a story so it appears at the top of your followers’ stories carousel. Send animated “superlikes” to other stories. Create audience lists beyond “best friends.” Why it is important. Instagram openly recognizing that gossip and obsession with the metrics of your stories are behaviors widespread enough to monetize. But there is something that is also very important: being able to highlight stories so that they are seen more is a change in the rules of the game. These types of functions end up creating a distinction between users that affects not only the functionalities to which they have access, but also the visibility of their content. Why now. This is the next question to ask ourselves. Instagram is, along with Facebook, the social network that generates the most incomeso it’s not that you have a liquidity problem. However, right now Meta’s actions are not going through their best momentlargely due to the mistrust generated by the astronomical spending on infrastructure for AI. With 3 billion active usersInstagram Plus has the potential to boost revenue even more to face what is coming. TObackground. Instagram is following in the footsteps of other social networks that have opted for this type of subscriptions. We saw the case of the most aggressive subscription model with Twitter (now X), which after the acquisition by Elon Musk completely changed the meaning of the blue tick. Today, if you don’t pay you can’t send messages to any user, edit posts, create longer posts or access Grok. At the other extreme we have Snapchat+, which is a subscription that adds benefits without deteriorating the free experience. Among its features are being able to access experimental features first, more storage, and access to premium lenses. They launched it in 2022 and they have done quite well: Today it has 25 million subscribers and has generated 1 billion in revenue. Availability and price. At the moment, Instagram Plus is going to be tested in a limited number of countries. Meta hasn’t said which ones, but we know it has already appeared in Japan, the Philippines and Mexico. Regarding prices, according to some users have postedin Mexico it is 39 pesos per month, which at the current exchange rate is 1.88 euros. It is not clear in which other countries they will test it or when they plan to launch it globally. Image | Sanket Mishra, Pexels

Millions invested in AI graphical improvements so people say it looks like an Instagram beauty filter

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Nvidia presented DLSS 5 at GTC 2026 as the greatest graphical advance that video games have experienced since the ray tracing. The reaction has been almost unanimous: the gaming community and industry professionals themselves have described it as a “slop AI filter.” The rejection has been so frontal and almost unanimous that Nvidia has had to come out to clarify how the technology works and what control developers really have over these visual improvements. What is DLSS 5. DLSS technology was born in 2019 as an intelligent upscaling system: the GPU renders at lower resolution and the AI ​​reconstructs each frame up to 4K with minimal quality penalty. With each iteration (DLSS 3, 3.5, 4, 4.5) the goal remained the same, but DLSS 5 breaks that logic. According to Nvidia’s own announcementwe are looking at a real-time neural rendering model that analyzes the color and motion vectors of each frame and generates lighting and photorealistic-looking materials on them. The system recognizes the semantics of the scene (skin, hair, fabrics, metals) and applies its own interpretation of how those elements should look under real physical lighting. Jensen Huang defined it with a phrase that well summarizes the ambition of this new iteration: “Twenty-five years after Nvidia invented the shader programmable, we are reinventing computer graphics.” Digital Foundrywhich had access to the technology before the announcement (and which has been heavily criticized for its glowing coverage), called it “the most amazing I’ve seen in my time at Digital Foundry” and pointed to genuinely notable improvements in environments from ‘Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ or ‘Oblivion Remastered’. The faces, Juan, the faces. The problem is that the official demo video included sequences from ‘Resident Evil Requiem’, ‘Starfield’, ‘Hogwarts Legacy’ and ‘EA Sports FC’, and in all of them the system visibly altered the characters’ faces. The protagonist of ‘Requiem’, Grace Ashcroft, has been the most widespread example: more pronounced cheekbones, fuller lips and uniform skin tone. According to Kotakuthe effect seems to apply a TikTok beauty filter on characters with an artistic intention other than physical attractiveness, as is the case with Ashcroft. Another example is that of the ‘Starfield’ characters, which are not very detailed in themselves, and which gain facial resolution but lose all aesthetic coherence with the original design. In ‘Hogwarts Legacy‘, an old woman with gently modeled wrinkles begins to show off a deeply cracked face completely alien to what was seen in the game. Therefore, the dreaded term ‘AI slop‘ appeared on social networks in a matter of minutes. He Nvidia GeForce on X announcement post was buried by negative replies, which accumulated favs and RTs in much greater quantity than the original post. Also the comments of the Digital Foundry video They were almost unanimously negative. The answer. Given the volume of criticism, Nvidia published a statement on YouTube clarifying how the system works. According to the companydevelopers have complete artistic control over DLSS 5: they can adjust the intensity of the effect, the color grading and mask specific areas where they do not want the AI ​​to act (the company calls it “controllability”). The company also clarified that the technology is not a filter applied on top of the image, but rather takes the color and motion vectors of the game to generate its output, “anchored to the source 3D content.” Bethesda, one of the most active studios in the initial support (Todd Howard had appeared in the presentation video praising the results in ‘Starfield’) posted hours later a more nuanced response on the studio’s official account. There they stated that “our art teams will adjust the lighting and final effect to look the way we consider best for each game. Everything will be under the control of our artists and will be completely optional for players.” Two ways of looking at it. The disparity in reactions reflects two legitimate ways of evaluating the same technology. What a good part of the community and numerous media outlets have criticized is that the modifications make the characters more realistic but different from how they were designed by the game’s art team. For example, concept artist Jeff Talbot said that: “In each shot the artistic direction was removed to add meaningless ‘details’ (…) This is a garbage AI filter.” Poor optimization. a few weeks ago There began to be talk that the proliferation of tools of upscaling and AI has reduced the pressure on studios to optimize their games: when DLSS or FSR can more than compensate for performance issues, the incentives to polish the native engine disappear. There is already someone he says it bluntly: Some studios design their games from the beginning assuming that the upscaling It will fix what’s broken, rather than using it as a further improvement on an already solid foundation. With DLSS 5 that takes a qualitative leap, and the risk is not only aesthetic: it is work-related and creative. And then there’s an additional detail: the GTC demo required two GeForce RTX 5090s running in parallel (one to render the game, another to run the DLSS 5 neural model). Nvidia claims that the final launch, scheduled for fall 2026, will work with a single card, but the magnitude of the hardware raised questions about the actual requirements. If studios start designing with DLSS 5 as a safety net, what version of the game will the player without that GPU receive? Real video games. There is something that Nvidia seems to have not taken into account: people like video games because they look like video games. Imperfection has a human touch that is part of the product’s identity. Grace Ashcroft works as a character in ‘Requiem’ precisely because her appearance reflects exhaustion and vulnerability. DLSS 5’s AI makes it something that has been described as the result of applying Nvidia’s system to a character whose aesthetic is not designed to be photorealistic. The problem isn’t just that the result is aesthetically questionable: it’s that the entire premise is wrong. Nvidia assumes that “more … Read more

the price of being on TikTok or Instagram all day

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It’s quite a motherly phrase to hear that being in front of your phone all the time watching TikTok or playing the video game console has a very clear effect on the brain and that it ‘rots’. In English, this is something that is known as ‘brain rot’ and refers to this lightheadedness after several hours in front of screens, and science has now begun to take this concept as something very important and not like an internet meme. Its meaning. This concept related to the brain ‘rotting’ refers to the cognitive deterioration and mental exhaustion that people suffer, especially in adolescents and young adults, due to excessive exposure to low-quality online material. And although this started as a meme, it is today a neurocognitive syndrome confirmed by institutions like the American Psychological Association, where it has been seen that the brain is literally getting smaller. The dopamine trap. The design of short video platforms like TikTok it’s not accidentalbut it is created to retain the user’s attention so that they do not stop sliding the screen down. And it is something that is very well studied, since, as interaction on these social platforms increases, so does the brain’s need to receive a dopamine rush. It literally creates a dependency. Doomscrolling. This system in our brain, driven by dopamine, encourages a never-ending cycle of consumption, which has given rise to terms like ‘Doomscrolling‘ which is the compulsive action of scrolling through social media feeds focused on negative information or distressing. And this, rather than generating rejection, causes us to be in a state of hypervigilance linked to high levels of anxiety, stress and cognitive fatigue. There is also another concept quite important in the world of social networks such as ‘Zombie scrolling’, which consists of passively scrolling through social networks without any purpose or objective. In this way, this mentally absent consumption reduces the brain’s ability to maintain sustained attention. Brain effect. The act of constantly scrolling on the screen is something that has been widely studied today and points to measurable neurological consequences. What has been seen here is that the brain experience cognitive overload when you try to process the constant flow of fragmented information, with topics that are really disparate from one video to the next, making you not have time to process the first before starting to watch the second. Its consequences. Research published in Addictive Behaviors they point out that compulsive cell phone use reduces the volume of gray matter in key areas for empathy, memory and self-regulation. This means that literally the brain is reducing its size with the passage of time due to the fact of being like a zombie browsing TikTok all day. In addition to this, science has seen that addiction to short videos increases activity in reward and emotion regions, causing structural differences in the frontal cortex and increasing impulsivity. Something that adds to the memory impairmentfailures in long-term retention and also at a worse attention performance. How to avoid it. As alarming as this may seem, we must remember that we have brain neuroplasticity on our side to be able to reverse these effects. In this way, there are several strategies to mitigate the fact that the brain begins to be greatly affected by being on social networks for a large number of hours. One of the tips is undoubtedly to reduce the time we spend in front of the screen to reduce cognitive overload. Furthermore, stopping following accounts that provoke negative emotions and looking for environments that are positive or friendlier to avoid anxiety is something we should get used to in our daily lives. Images | Hoi An and Da Nang In Xataka | The science of “doomscrolling”: how technology hacked psychology so we can’t let go of our phones

Bad Bunny deleted his Instagram after the Super Bowl. Everything is part of a larger project

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On Sunday, February 8, 2026, Bad Bunny starred in an unprecedented milestone in Super Bowl history by becoming the first solo Latin artist to star. the concert-show during the intermissionin a performance almost entirely in Spanish that reached more than 100 million viewers. Just hours later, the Puerto Rican artist deleted all of his content on Instagramleaving their more than 51 million followers in front of a completely empty profile. The avalanche of speculation has been immediate. What was seen? Bad Bunny’s approximately 13-minute concert turned the intermission into a visual love letter to Puerto Rico. The artist started walking through sugar cane fields, crossed a Puerto Rican street fair and incorporated La Casita, the iconic traditional Puerto Rican pink house that has become a distinctive element of his concerts. The fluidity of the camera, the variety of topics included, the surprise appearances of Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin, or guests such as Pedro Pascal or Jessica Alba stood out. The irony of the scenario. The choice of Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, as the setting for the largest celebration of Latino culture in the history of the Super Bowl takes on an ironic dimension in the context of 2026: California is going through one of the most intense episodes of immigration enforcement in decades. Immigration arrests in San Diego they shot up 1,500% compared to the previous year. For this reason, the political context surrounding the performance was especially tense. In October 2025, when the action was announced, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem declared on a conservative podcast that ICE would be “everywhere” at the Super Bowl and that “only law-abiding Americans who love this country should attend.” The Trump administration had intensified raids in Californian cities while the Puerto Rican artist publicly expressed his fear that “the damn ICE could be outside” his concerts, which is why he canceled several on the US mainland and focused on his residence. Bad Bunny closed his performance with a bright sign that read “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.” Beyond music. ‘‘I should have taken more photos’, the artist’s latest album, has been described as “a cry of resistance” for Puerto Ricans everywhere: it is about preserving a culture in danger of disappearing. It was recorded entirely in Puerto Rico with collaborators exclusively from there. The 13-minute short film that accompanied the release of the album explores themes of loss, displacement and the fading of cultural identity. The project’s mascot is an endangered toad. And songs like ‘What Happened to Hawaii’ address issues like gentrification. This political charge is not new in the artist’s career. In July 2019, interrupted his European tour to return to Puerto Rico and join the massive protests demanding the resignation of Governor Ricardo Rosselló. In 2020, made visible on ‘The Tonight Show’ the murder of Alexa, a Puerto Rican trans woman. The Super Bowl performance was not an isolated event but the continuation of a narrative meticulously constructed across multiple platforms. The visual coherence (La Casita, the flags, the aesthetics) are the constant reminder that each performance is a chapter of the same project: pan-Latin representation in times of adversity. The strategy continues. The emptying of Bad Bunny’s Instagram profile just hours after his performance at the Super Bowl is not a break with his communication strategy, but rather its confirmation. In 2022, before the release of ‘A summer without you’, used the same tactic to generate expectation. That album would become the most successful Spanish album in history. In 2023 repeated the procedure after their world tour, announcing a period of hiatus. The difference in 2026 lies in the political context surrounding the gesture. While previous wipes functioned primarily as a prelude to new musical releases, this one comes on the heels of the most politicized performance of his career, which has included criticism of trump and threats from Secretary Noem. Unlike similar maneuvers that they already did Taylor Swift or Beyoncé, with this Bad Bunny continues with the construction of his transmedia project, whose next step is a world tour that will take the message to Australia, Japan or Spain, among other destinations. Each platform (the album, the stage, social networks) becomes a chapter in a story about Latin identity that transcends the merely commercial. In Xataka | Spotify killed the record and the industry pivoted to concerts. Netflix killed cinema and the industry was left with a “space crisis”

“You can’t trust your eyes to know what’s real anymore.” Instagram CEO announces that the feed is dead

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That the Internet as we knew it no longer exists is not a surprise: it has been filled with search results generated by artificial intelligence and from ‘slop‘. The consequences are already visible: clicks have been reduced by halfwhich is catastrophic for the media. But not only the text is suffering from this barrage of AI that blurs everything: already We do not know how to distinguish if an image is real or notwe have gone from document our life on social networks to the era of influencer content favored by the algorithm to videos and images that are not real, but can pass as such. There are no longer four fingers that are worth it. Instagrammers, the feed is dead. And this is also going to take its toll on social networks. Adam Mosseri, CEO of Instagram, closed 2025 with a publication in the form of a presentation of 20 images where he reflected in depth on what is coming: “the era of infinite synthetic content”, the antithesis of a more personal Instagram that has been dead for years. For Mosseri, AI has turned the carefully maintained grid with its algorithm into something of the past: “Unless you are under 25 years old and use Instagram, you probably think of the app as a feed of square photos. The aesthetics are careful: a lot of makeup, skin softening, high-contrast photography, beautiful landscapes,” Mosseri’s sentence falls like a stone on this millennial, who still uses Instagram as a kind of photo album. “That feed is dead. People largely stopped sharing personal moments on the feed years ago.” Tap to go to the post In search of something real. Mosseri explains that now its users keep their contacts up to date on their personal lives with “improvised photos of unflattering shoes and poses” shared via DM. And this also affects content creators: the omnipresence of images made by AI is going to bring a change: goodbye to those pro-looking photographs in favor of a more real and improvised aesthetic: “Flattering images are cheap to produce and boring to consume. People want content that feels real.” In fact, the CEO of Instagram points to manufacturers, applicable to cameras and mobile phones, who he says are making a mistake by democratizing the ability to “look like a professional photographer from 2015.” Because RAW images with defects are still a sign of reality until AI is able to copy them. But what is real? The time has come to unlearn to believe what our eyes see, something we have been doing all our lives. Javier Lacort explained that our entire epistemology (ranging from court testimony to photo albums) is based on the fact that seeing is a way of knowing. If you see a tiger, there is a tiger. If you see a photo of a tiger, someone has been close to one. This no longer applies: the era of uncover organized fake news has made way for anyone with Nano Banana Pro can get such an absurdly realistic image with a basic prompt in just a few seconds. Now creating a deepfake is trivial. Adam Mosseri think equal. “For most of my life I was able to safely assume that photographs or videos were largely faithful captures of moments that actually happened. That’s clearly no longer the case, and it’s going to take years to adjust. We’re going to go from defaulting to assuming that what we see is real to starting from skepticism. To paying attention to who’s sharing something and why. This will be uncomfortable: we’re genetically predisposed to believe our eyes.” If you can’t beat them… The paradigm shift has already occurred, so now Instagram and other platforms have to adapt to this new reality: “we have to build the best creative tools. Label AI-generated content and verify authentic content. Show credibility signals about who is posting. Continue to improve the ranking of originality.” It is the apocalypse of what is a photo that we have been predicting for years. Focusing on Instagram, Mosseri talks about how “we like to complain about ‘AI junk content,’ but there is a lot of amazing content created with AI.” He doesn’t give concrete examples or talk about Meta tools to make this possible, but Meta has already added AI tools on Instagram and Facebook. Without going any further, his AI Studio allows you to create personalized chatbots to deal with your followers. New times, new identification measures. It is increasingly difficult to identify content in AI, so it proposes fingerprints and cryptographic signatures in cameras to identify real content, forgetting about labels or watermarks. In any case, it advocates greater transparency about who publishes on the platform and improve creativity so that its human users can compete with content made in AI. In Xataka | The future of the Internet is to be flooded with AI. And there are those who have already seen a business niche: content made by humans In Xataka | There is a generation working for free as a documentarian of their own life: they are not influencers but they act as if they were.

You feel like going to Sri Lanka because you saw it on Instagram. The problem is that the person who recommended it to you was an AI

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The image is familiar. A young woman smiles from a beach with turquoise waters. In the following publication, he appears walking along a cobblestone street in Marrakech. Below, he poses at a luxury hotel in the Maldives. The skin is perfect, the body responds to the prevailing canons and the text accompanies with inspirational phrases about traveling, discovering cultures and “living in the moment.” Nothing seems out of place. Until you discover the reality. That traveler has not flown, she has not walked those streets or tried the food she recommends. It doesn’t exist. She is an influencer generated by artificial intelligence and is part of a phenomenon that is growing quietly: the normalization of artificial profiles that influence the real decisions of millions of people. A silent, but massive boom. In the last two years, Instagram and other social networks have been filled with virtual influencers: characters created with generative AI who pretend to be real people and publish travel content, lifestyle or fashion, the best known case in Spain is Aitana Lopez. Some indicate it more or less clearly in their biography; others do so ambiguously or almost invisibly. However, what is interesting here is how the examples multiply in the tourism sector. Sena Z has been presented as “the first travel and hospitality influencer created with AI”, It’s a collaboration between the luxury group Cenizaro Hotels & Resorts and the technology firm Bracai. Sena publishes cultural recommendations, messages about sustainability and photographs from exotic destinations. Another notable case is Emma, ​​the official influencer and chatbot of the German National Tourism Office. Emma not only publish content on Instagrambut answers questions in more than 20 languages ​​from the official website of the organization. As explained from the entity to the Washington Postits creation is part of a strategy to “stay at the forefront of digital innovation.” Other profiles are added to these profiles, such as Radhika, Emily Pellegrinior corporate avatars like Samathe Qatar Airways virtual stewardess who appears both on the airline’s website and on social networks, publishing as if she were living real experiences. These are not isolated experiments. As detailed by The New York Timesairlines, tourist offices and brands are increasingly turning to these avatars because they are cheaper, faster and completely controllable. An AI influencer does not get sick, does not get tired, does not age and does not generate personal controversies. Inexperienced influencers. The question is inevitable: what happens when the experience is not real? Just look through these profiles to see it: they recommend destinations, restaurants and cultures that they have not experienced. Even so, they generate engagementaccumulate thousands of likes and comments, and influence travel decisions. From the brands’ point of view, the appeal is evident. According to data collected by the New York mediacreating an advanced avatar can cost between $5,000 and $15,000, compared to traditional campaigns that easily exceed six figures. In addition, content can be produced without travel, without filming equipment and without negotiating with human talent. However, for real creators, the impact is already being felt. Human influencers cited by the same medium explain that brands are reducing payments, eliminating extras and offering less advantageous collaborations. AI thus becomes a new direct competition within the creative economy, a sector valued at more than 200 billion dollars globally. Is someone regulating it? While Technology advances quickly, regulation tries to catch up. Going home, in Europe, the clearest answer comes through the Artificial Intelligence Regulations (AI Act). Article 50, which will come into force in August 2026establishes transparency obligations for providers and users of AI systems. Among them: Report when a person interacts with an AI system. Mark content generated or manipulated by AI (text, image, audio or video) in detectable format. Force deepfakes and AI-generated texts that report on matters of public interest to be declared, unless there is human editorial review. The European Commission has already started the preparation of a Code of Good Practices for the marking and labeling of content generated by AI, with the participation of experts, platforms and civil society. The goal is to facilitate compliance before the law is fully applicable. However, many virtual profiles do not clearly indicate either their artificial nature or their commercial links, leaving the user in a field of ambiguity. Unreal bodies, algorithmic authority. Beyond destination promotion, most AI influencers share common traits: eternal youth, slim bodies, perfect skin and a total absence of imperfections. This phenomenon coincides with the return of Y2K aesthetics and extreme thinness on social networks, a trend that has been linked to a decline in body diversity. The most notable case was due to advertising campaigns with models generated by AI, like Guess in Vogue. Mental health experts warned that constant exposure to unreal bodies can aggravate self-esteem problems and increase risk of eating disorders. The difference, they point out, is key: while traditional retouching started from a real body, AI creates bodies that have never existedimpossible to achieve even in theory. This logic has been taken to the extreme with phenomena such as the Miss IA pageantwhere artificially generated models compete showing bodies without pores, without age and without history. According to plastic surgeonsmore and more patients come to consultation with images created by AI asking for impossible interventions and pointing out the risk of frustration, obsession and psychological damage. The underlying problem: we no longer know what is real. All of this occurs in a broader context: a crisis of visual confidence. As my colleague in Xataka has analyzedthe massive generation of hyperrealistic images has broken a chain that for centuries seemed solid: if something was seen, it had probably existed. Today, that presumption has disappeared. Seeing is no longer equivalent to knowing. In this new scenario, we not only doubt whether an influencer has really traveled, but also whether the image itself corresponds to something that happened. The consequence is a permanent suspicion that affects memory, attention and the way we relate to digital reality. The technical solution—seals, metadata, … Read more

Researchers removed Instagram and TikTok from 300 young people to see if their anxiety decreased. The results speak for themselves

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The debate about whether social networks are the new tobacco for the mental health of the generation Z It’s been on for years. There are many young people who They can’t go without watching TikTok completing the streak with their friends, uploading stories of what they eat to Instagram or simply away from the cell phone. And this is something that can be tremendously harmful. What we knew. Until now we could make one of them, and parents undoubtedly remember this message when they spend many hours in front of the phone. Even companies offer the tools to be able to limit the amount of time that we spend in an app and it even applies limits to us. With numbers. But now science has shed light on this problem with a published study in JAMA Network Open that provides concrete data. The premise was simple: ask a group of young adults (ages 18 to 24) to reduce their consumption of social networks this week. Once done, we wanted to see if the symptoms of anxiety, depression or insomnia were reduced. And it is precisely the excessive use of social networks is related to depressionsince it generates social isolation, low self-esteem, cyberbullying or even physical disorders due to the effects of blue light from the screen. So… Does giving up the cell phone also improve the quality of life of young people? The study. To do so, they not only focused on what users said they did with their mobile phones, since lying can be very easy in this case. What they did was passively record what was done with the phone through the ‘digital phenotyping‘. In total, there were 373 participants in this study, of which only 295 were able to complete the intervention, which was completely voluntary. They only had to reduce consumption for one week of the main social networks: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and X. The results. Simply put, the results showed significant clinical improvement across key areas after just seven days. The data indicated that depression symptoms were reduced by 24.8%, anxiety by 16.1% and sleep problems fell by 14.5%. Interestingly, the study found that the effects were much more pronounced in those participants who already had symptoms of moderate or severe depression at the start of the experiment. Don’t let go of your cell phone. A priori, one might think that when a young person automatically leaves social networks aside, their cell phone will be of absolutely no use to them. But nothing could be further from the truth. He digital phenotyping revealed that although social media use fell from about 2 hours a day to just 30 minutes, total screen time increased slightly by 4.5% and participants spent 6.3% more time at home. In this way, users replaced the infinite scrolling of TikTok with other digital activities such as messaging, browsing the internet or even playing games. However, despite still being glued to the screen, mental health improved. This reinforces a theory that is gaining weight among experts: the problem is not the screen itself, but how we use it. The study points out that objective use time has a weak association with mental health, since what is really harmful is “problematic use”, such as negative social comparison or emotional addiction to platforms. Easier apps to leave. We can all have more ‘affection’ for a specific social network, which is surely more difficult to stop using. In this case, it was seen that it was easier for users to reduce the time they spent on TikTok or X. But Instagram or Snapchat were the “hard bones” to beat. Specifically, 67.8% of Instagram users and 48.8% of Snapchat users failed to comply with the reduction and continued to use them significantly during the detox process. It is not a treatment. Although the percentages sound like a victory, it is necessary to maintain the usual scientific skepticism. Dr. John Torous, co-author of the study, warns in statements collected for him New York Times that reducing networks “would certainly not be your first or only form of treatment (for mental health problems),” although it is worth experimenting with. This focuses on the fact that the study has some limitations such as the lack of a reference control group and it was not seen how long the detoxification process from social networks lasted. But what did not improve was loneliness, since eliminating these social networks in people can have the opposite effect by also cutting the connection link that unites them with other people. Images | Panos Sakalakis Vitaly Gariev In Xataka | Social networks were once a place to tell our lives. Now the trend is different: “zero posts”

How to share Spotify Wrapped 2025 on Instagram, WhatsApp or other apps

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Let’s tell you how to share your Spotify Wrapped data on social networks or any application. He Spotify Wrapped 2025 has already been released, and the best thing about this annual round of statistics is always sharing it and comparing it with your contacts and friends. That’s why we are going to tell you several ways you can do it. We will tell you how to share any slide, something quite simple but which option you may not have noticed. We will also tell you how to share the statistics page that appears at the end, and even the playlist. Remember that in addition to apps, you can also share all the statistics internally with Spotify contacts through its private messaging system. Share any slide from the Wrapped The Wrapped is made up of several slides. To share them, you have to wait for them to finish playing. These slides usually have animations, and nothing happens while they are running. But when they finish a button appears Share this story down at all. This button displays the sharing options of your mobile operating system. you should have shortcut to share it on Instagram Storiesbut also to send it on WhatsApp or share it in any other app. Besides, you will also see your Spotify contacts to send it as an internal message. You will also see an option Dischargewhich what it does is download the slide to your mobile memory so that you can share it manually through the medium or application you want. Share your Wrapped summary When you finish viewing all the stories in your Wrapped, you will see a final slide in the form of a summary. In it, you will be able to move it laterally to choose different color combinations, and when you have chosen one press the button Share. This will allow you to share it on social networks, messaging apps or download the slide to share it by hand wherever you want. In the section Wrapped from the Spotify app A category will also appear especially for you. In case you have not saved it while viewing the slides, here you will have the Wrapped playlistwith your most listened to songs of 2025. When you enter the playlist, you will only have to press the button Share that appears as with any other playlist. With it you can share the playlist with whoever you want in apps or internal messages, or even copy the link to paste it in other applications. In Xataka Basics | 53 third-party tools and apps to get the most out of Spotify with statistics, playlists and new features

There’s a reason you spend hours watching reels on Instagram until 3:00 AM: the science of doomscrolling

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It’s one in the morning. We should be sleeping but the finger is still sliding across the screen, scrolling through videos on TikTokreels on Instagram or posts on X. A viral meme, a new fire in the area or a new political crisis has us hooked on the screen. And although we may be exhausted, it cannot be stopped. If this scene sounds familiar to you, then welcome to the club. doomscrolling. A term that became massively popular during the pandemic and which can be defined as the habit of consuming prolonged form negative news or distressing, mainly through social networks. But behind this process, which may be very common in society right now, there are numerous chemical processes in the brain that science has not hesitated to investigate. The trap mechanism. To understand why we do doomscrollingwe must first understand that our brain did not evolve to have X or TikTok, but rather it evolved to survive. And it is not so long ago that humans were hunting for food or fleeing from a threat in nature, and it is something that our brain is still very much aware of. According to the most recent scientific literaturethe fact of sliding our screen down activates our reward brain circuits such as the dopaminergic system in each interaction. This drives us at all times to continue searching for information and evolutionarily knowing “where the danger is” was vital. The problem is that in this case the algorithm has no purpose, and we can spend 24 hours watching this type of news. But the reward system, which gives us ‘pleasure’ when knowing where the danger is, is not alone. It is accompanied by the amygdala which is the fear center in our brain. When seeing all this information, such as a war nearby in our territory, the brain interprets it as a potential threat that results in a large release of cortisol. This hormone is precisely known as the ‘stress hormone’, because it keeps the body in a state of hypervigilance. The result of these two circuits is quite clear as point out publications in Frontiers in Psychiatry and Brain Behavior: The brain seeks relief from information, but only finds more threats. This results in a toxic cycle being generated in which one seeks to calm down, becomes more scared, and searches again. The rotten brain. On social networks there is already a lot of talk of the term brain rot which translates to ‘brain rot’ like a real meme. but science has a very different opinionsince recent research suggests that repeated exposure to these fragmented stimuli with high emotional impact, with 15-second videos and alarmist headlines, have a high physical cost. The impact is located above all in executive functions (planning, organization, decision making…). And the constant alternation of these catastrophic contexts forces the brain to jump from one idea to another in milliseconds, and it is not something free. The cost we have to pay can be summarized in three points: Mental fatigue due to the high consumption of glucose that the brain has to make by having to constantly change focus. Deterioration of the prefrontal cortex, which is associated with a reduction in the efficiency of the area responsible for planning and impulse control. Processing blockage when the brain is on hyperalert. This makes it difficult to transfer information to long-term memory. Do we no longer know how to concentrate? This is the question we can all ask ourselves due to this phenomenon. The short answer from science is: we know, but it is much harder for us to “get started.” Studies on digital multitasking indicate that it is not that we have lost ability physiological of sustained attention, but we have trained our brain to expect interruptions. Deep attention (what you need to read a book for example) requires a “warm-up” time. He doomscrolling and the constant stream of notifications resets that counter constantly. Research collected in BMC Public Health they point out that attention remains “anchored” waiting for the next update. Even when you are not looking at your phone, a part of your cognitive resources is focused on it, reducing your performance on the task in front of you. It is not an irreversible decline, it is an atrophy due to lack of use of deep concentration circuits. There is hope. Despite the apocalyptic tone of the studies themselves on the subject, the scientific conclusion It’s not that we’re doomed. to be distracted automatons glued to a phone. The great advantage that humans have is neuroplasticity. With this term we mean that just as the brain learns to scroll compulsively, it can “unlearn.” Experts agree that the damage is not permanent unless the behavior becomes chronic for years without intervention. Evidence-supported strategies for breaking the cortisol-dopamine loop include: Set strict times to inform yourself and never before bed. Do exercises mindfulness as a tool to restore the default neural network. Allowing the brain to rest and ‘get bored’ without stimuli to help cleanse itself and regain the ability to focus. Images | Yazid N In Xataka | Young people have decided to stop posting (so much) on Facebook and Instagram. “AI-generated garbage” has free rein

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