What If Your Scroll Was a Vote?

A manifesto about attention, algorithms, and what your scrolling choices are actually doing.

Looking down into an open beehive. Thousands of decisions happening at once

I read something this week that stopped me mid-scroll.

Critics of social media design have described it as the “largest ongoing behavioural experiment in history”. And instead of terrifying me (which, yes, a little) it made something crystallise.

If it’s an experiment, we are not just the subjects. We are also running it.

You are reading this right now. That means somewhere in the chaos of everything the internet wanted to show you today (the outrage bait, the before-and-afters, the genocides, the man yelling about protein) you found your way here. To bees. To something real. And that was not an accident. That was a choice you made, probably dozens of times, that taught the algorithm something about who you are.

I see you. And I want to talk about what we do with that.

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Here is the thing nobody says out loud

The algorithm is not evil. It is not good either. It is a mirror. An obsessive, slightly unhinged mirror that watches your every move and asks, over and over: what do you actually want?

Not what you say you want. What you stop for.

And right now, the collective answer (the one being written by billions of tiny scrolling decisions every single day) is mostly: drama. Fear. Things that make us feel bad but can’t look away from. The flaming wreckage of late-stage capitalism.

But it doesn’t have to be.

Because here is what I know, as someone who thinks about this more than is probably healthy (okay, I also keep bees and argue with bureaucrats about pesticides, so “probably healthy” is doing some heavy lifting there): the algorithm responds to counter-signals just as fast as it responds to everything else.

Every time you linger on something about bees instead of the outrage of the hour, that is a signal. Every time you follow an account that teaches you something about the ecosystem instead of selling you something, that is a signal. Every time you share a post about pollinators, rewilding, the emergency of losing the living world, that is a signal.

And the algorithm doesn’t just note it. It amplifies it.

Scottish dark honeybee

Here is the science of it, because I can’t help myself.

Sharing is the strongest signal you can send. Stronger than a like. Stronger than a comment. When you share something, you are not just saying “I enjoyed this.” You are saying: I want my people to see this. I’m vouching for it. I am putting my name on it.

The algorithm reads that as high conviction. It pushes harder. It reaches further. One share from the right person can do what a hundred likes can’t.

You don’t need a platform. You need a phone and a reason to care and you already have both.

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I know how this sounds.

An observational beekeeper who would rather be elbow-deep in a hive than online, telling you to use social media more. The irony is not lost on me. Neither is the fact that the bees would absolutely judge me for this.

But you know what I keep coming back to? The internet is going to be full of something. It already is. The question is just full of what?

Right now it is full of people trying to sell you things you don’t need, opinions designed to make you angry and enough wellness content to drown a small country. Gods know we don’t need more of that.

What if we made it a little more full of bees? Of forests. Of the kind of knowledge that actually changes how you walk through the world. What if we used our tiny, weird, individual digital windows to show the algorithm (and each other) what we actually think is important for us?

You are not just a user. You are a signal. Make it count.

Meet Titanilla, international bee science communicator, editor of Bees & Beyond, founder of Beewitching Embassy