BELGRADE, THURSDAY

IT’S NOT CALLED doomscrolling for nothing.

If you want people to watch your YouTube post, tell them something bad is on its away.

If you want to grab their attention immediately, tell them they have been lied to.

“No one ever got rich online telling people the world isn’t such a bad place and that, likely as not, the sun will rise in the morning,” says Owen Zen, a media psychologist specializing in the human craving for bad news.

“It serves two purposes: one, humans as a species thrive on threat. We have been adapted for it for hundreds of thousands of years. Where there is none, we simply create it. And two, we really like to know our neighbors are probably having a worse time than we are. It isn’t that we particularly expect to do well; we just want no one else to either. And the media, especially that available online, pushed by algorithms, just feeds this desire as fast as it can. Lies, in particular, feed a human sense that we are being shut out of a room reserved for elites and cliques and that if only we knew the truth, things would be so much better. If you banned the words “They Lied To You” from YouTube, maybe half the videos posted would disappear. For a moment. Because they would come up with a similar phrase and then whole business would start again. We just cannot survive without good old bad news.”