There’s been an ant mill, sometimes called a death spiral, that had gone viral on social media some time ago. It’s a real thing.

Army ants follow by pheromones, and if they get separated from the main group, they can end up following each other in circles until they either find a path out or die of exhaustion.

It’s mesmerizing to watch. It’s almost like they’re being held in orbit by something like gravity, but that’s not the case. They’re just lost ants, going in circles.

I’ve seen enough things on the Internet come and go to see a sort of commonality.

It’s actually a pretty good metaphor for echo chambers in social media. Social media isn’t just singular echo chambers, the echo chambers are based on attributes.

If you like, as an example, dogs, you can get into an echo chamber of dog memes. If you also happen to like cats – it is possible to like both – you can get into an echo chamber of cat memes. These are pretty benign echo chambers, but when you start seeing the same memes over and over, you can be pretty sure that echo chamber is in a spiral. You lose interest. You leave, finding a different ‘pheromone trail’ to follow or just… taking a hard right when everyone is going left.

With centralized social networks such as Facebook or Twitter X, algorithms feed these echo chambers that connect people. When those echo chambers become stale, the connections with others within the echo chamber remain and before you know it you have the equivalent of an ant mill of humans in a social network. To stay in that echo chamber, critical thinking is ignored and confirmation biases are fed.

This also accelerates when the people who provide content to the echo chambers – the pheromones, if you will – leave. Some might follow them elsewhere, but the inertia keeps many there until… well, until they’re exhausted.

This seems a logical conclusion to the algorithmic display of content, or promoting certain posts all the time in search results.

Do you find yourself using the same apps, doing the same things over and over with diminishing returns of happiness (assuming there is happiness in your echo chamber)? Does it seem like you’ve seen that meme before?

You might be in a spiral.

Get out. Don’t die sniffing someone else’s posterior.