‘I felt doomed’: social media guessed I was pregnant – and my feed soon grew horrifying

I once asked my mother what the hardest part of pregnancy was. “All the advice”, she said.

That was back in the 90s. Now, thanks to social media, pregnant people are subjected to an even greater onslaught of free, relentless advice. Sometimes it’s useful. But as Kathryn Wheeler wrote this week, often, it’s terrifying.

“My social media algorithms knew I was pregnant before family, friends or my GP,” Wheeler writes. No sooner had she gotten a positive pregnancy test than her Instagram and TikTok feeds were offering up pregnancy content.

Soon, the videos she had to scroll through got darker. Many of them included miscarriages, stillbirths, and birth disfigurements.

“In another context, before I was pregnant, I would have found the content barrier-breaking and important,” Wheeler says, adding that for the right people, these videos might be a lifeline. But when she talked to other pregnant women, she saw the ways that social media preyed on their deepest fears.

“Distressing content isn’t a glitch; it’s engagement, and engagement is revenue,” explains Dr Christina Inge, a Harvard researcher specializing in the ethics of technology. “Fear-based content keeps people hooked because it creates a sense of urgency.”

There is no tidy solution to this, experts say. Inge urges users to remember that their algorithms are a construction and not “neutral mirrors of reality.” And if scrolling becomes too distressing, “reduce your use of social media,” she says.

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In this week’s Is it true that … Kate Lloyd examines whether one really needs to eat protein right after working out. The answer? Yes, but don’t overthink it. Usually, Crouse recommends the athletes she works with “consume 20-30g of protein within 30-60 minutes of finishing a resistance training session”. The protein helps increase the rate at which muscles repair and rebuild. If you’re what Crouse calls a casual gym-goer though – working out three or four times a week – just make sure to have meals with carbs, proteins and veggies for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

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Sara Pepitone stopped coloring her hair and went gray during the Covid lockdown. “After the ugly misery of growing it out, I expected never to think about it again,” she writes. Then, she went to grad school. Confronted with new, younger classmates, she began questioning her decision. Pepitone writes about the prejudice and challenges people face when they go gray and dare to show their age. “How different would my experience have been if it didn’t matter to be gray?” she says. “And how could I have thought it wouldn’t.”

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A reader, 53, tells Annalisa Barbieri that she thought she would end up caring for her husband, 60, in old age. But while her husband remains healthy, she is struggling with a noticeable cognitive decline and decreased mobility. Her husband is “not an outwardly caring person”, and she isn’t sure he will care for her if her health declines further. Barbieri describes the letter as one of the saddest she’s read, “because this gap between you and your family could be bridged with communication”. Her husband’s way of expressing care may be different than hers, but “it doesn’t mean that he doesn’t want to care for you.” She just needs to learn to ask for what she needs – easier said than done, sometimes.

Read the full story here.