Unraveling Entangled Feeds: Rethinking Social Media Design to Enhance User Well-being
Published in The 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2026
Recommended citation: Milton, A., Runnington, D., Terveen, L., Kaur, H., & Chancellor, S. (2026). " Unraveling Entangled Feeds: Rethinking Social Media Design to Enhance User Well-being " To Appear in Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. http://ashleemilton.github.io/files/entangle2026chi.pdf
Social media platforms have rapidly adopted algorithmic curation with little consideration for the potential harm to users’ mental well-being. We present findings from design workshops with 21 participants diagnosed with mental illness about their interactions with social media platforms. We find that users develop cause-and-effect explanations, or folk theories, to understand their experiences with algorithmic curation. These folk theories highlight a breakdown in algorithmic design that we explain using the framework of entanglement, a phenomenon where there is a disconnect between users’ actions and platform outcomes on an emotional level. Participants’ designs to address entanglement and mitigate harms centered on contextualizing their engagement and restoring explicit user control on social media. The conceptualization of entanglement and the resulting design recommendations have implications for social computing and recommender systems research, particularly in evaluating and designing social media platforms that support users’ mental well-being.