I don’t remember where I was when my TikTok feed showed me a video of a woman holding her stillborn baby, but I remember how I felt. At first, it appeared like any other video of a woman holding a newborn. It was tightly wrapped in blankets while she cradled it in her arms. She was crying, but so are most of the women in these post-birth videos. It wasn’t until I read the caption that I realised what I was looking at. Her baby had been delivered at 23 weeks. I was 22 weeks pregnant. I felt doomed.
My social media algorithms knew I was pregnant before family, friends or my GP. Within 24-hours, they were transforming my feeds. On Instagram and TikTok, I would scroll through videos of women recording themselves as they took pregnancy tests, just as I had done. I “liked”, “saved”, and “shared” the content, feeding the machine, showing it that this is how it could hold my attention, compelling it to send me more. So it did. But it wasn’t long before the joy of those early videos started to transform into something dark.
The algorithm began to deliver content about the things you fear the most while pregnant: “storytimes” about miscarriages; people sharing what happened to them and, harrowingly, filming themselves as they received the news that their baby had no heartbeat. Next came videos about birth disfigurements, those found by medical professionals early on, and those that were missed until the baby’s birth.
One night, after a before-bed scroll delivered me a video of a woman who filmed her near-death childbirth experience, I uninstalled the apps through tears. But they were soon reinstalled, when the needs of work, friendships and habit dictated they must be. I tried blocking the content I didn’t want to see, but it made little difference.
On TikTok, there are more than 300,000 videos tagged under “miscarriage”, and a further 260,000 under “miscarriageawareness”. One video with the caption “live footage of me finding out I had miscarried” has almost half a million views. Another showing a woman giving birth to a stillborn baby has just under five million.
In another context, before I was pregnant, I would have found the content barrier-breaking and important. I don’t think the individuals who share such vulnerable moments are doing anything wrong. For the right person, it could be a lifeline. But it didn’t feel right in the feed of someone who had inadvertently signalled to the algorithm that they were having a baby.
When I talk about this experience with others who were pregnant at the same time as me, I am met with knowing nods and stories that match my own. I hear about how they were also served up personalised doses of fear, and how the algorithms evolved to target the things specific to them. Our experiences feel like a radicalisation, as normal worries were driven to new heights by a barrage of content that became more and more extreme. This is pregnancy and motherhood in 2025.
“There are supportive posts, and then there are things so extreme and distressing, I don’t want to repeat them,” says Cherelle Mukoko, who is eight months pregnant. Mukoko mostly sees this content on Facebook and Instagram. She used to see it on TikTok as well, before she deleted the app. “My eldest is four. During that pregnancy, I came across upsetting posts on social media, some of them quite close to home, but this time it seems worse. The content feels more graphic and harder to escape.”
Mukoko, 35, who is a woman of colour, has found that she is specifically shown content around the treatment of Black women in pregnancy. An analysis of NHS data in 2024 found that Black women are up to six times more likely to experience severe complications during a hospital delivery than their white counterparts. “That hasn’t been my reality, but it does make me go into every appointment more cautious and on edge, wondering how I’ll be treated,” she says.
“They really do instil fear,” she continues. “You start thinking: ‘Could this happen to me? Will I be in that unlucky percentage?’ With the complications I’ve already had during this pregnancy, seeing such negative things makes my intrusive thoughts spiral. It can leave you feeling resentful – you’re enduring so much already, and then on top of that, your social media feed is fuelling more anxiety.”
For Dr Alice Ashcroft, a 29-year-old researcher and consultant who analyses the impact of identity, gendered language and technology: “It first started when I was trying to conceive. Seeing pregnancy announcements was hard. I also started to get a lot of ads for vitamins that would increase the chances of conception, but the reason I was struggling was an underlying health issue (a very rare blood disorder), so this was really hard to stomach.”
It didn’t stop once she was pregnant. “Towards the end of my pregnancy, we had some worrying scans at about 36 weeks, and I was looking at the web links suggested to me by the midwives. I’m not sure if it was the cookies I generated (which work as a digital footprint) or simply that the platforms I was engaging with knew I was in late pregnancy, but I started to see a large amount of content about late-stage terminations and miscarriages.” Her baby is now six months old.
The ability of algorithms to target our most sensitive and private fears is uncanny and cruel. “I’ve been convinced for years that social media is reading my mind,” says Jade Asha, 36, who had her second son in January. “With me, it was all about body image: showing women at nine months pregnant still in the gym, when I hadn’t been able to do a 10-minute walk in months. Pregnancy makes my arthritis flare up. Even now, there are some days I can barely leave the house because swollen knees make it so difficult to walk.”
Bottle-feeding her baby became another source of anxiety, says Asha. “My feeds would come up with posts about how breast is the only way, and a thousand comments of women agreeing. The problem with social media is that everyone is an ‘expert’ and so strong in their opinions that it can suck many others in. Social media makes me feel lazy, useless, and inferior – even though I am going through the toughest time of my life.”
For Dr Christina Inge, a researcher at Harvard University specialising in the ethics of technology, these experiences are not surprising. “Social media platforms are optimised for engagement, and fear is one of the most powerful drivers of attention,” she says. “Once the algorithm detects that a person is pregnant, or might be, it begins testing content – the same as it does with any other information about a user. If a user lingers on an alarming video on pregnancy, even if just for a second, that is interpreted as interest. The system then feeds you more of the same.
“Distressing content isn’t a glitch; it’s engagement, and engagement is revenue,” Inge continues. “Fear-based content keeps people hooked because it creates a sense of urgency; people feel they need to keep watching, even when it’s upsetting. The platforms benefit financially, even as the psychological toll grows.”
The negative effect of social media on pregnant women has been widely researched. In August, a systematic review into social media use during pregnancy considered studies from the US, the UK, Europe and Asia. It concluded that while social media can offer peer-to-peer advice, support and health education, “challenges such as misinformation, increased anxiety and excessive use persist”. The review’s author, Dr Nida Aftab, an obstetrician and gynaecologist, highlights the role healthcare professionals should play in helping women make informed decisions about their digital habits.
Not only are pregnant women more vulnerable social media users, they may also be spending more time scrolling. A study published in Midwifery last year found there was a significant change in time spent on social media, frequency of use, and problematic use during pregnancy, all of which peaked at week 20. Additionally, 10.5% of the women in the study had a possible addiction to social media as defined by the Bergen Social Media Addiction Scale, meaning that social media had a significantly negative effect on their daily lives.
Looking at the wider picture, Inge suggests several ways forward. Design changes could mean that platforms deliberately use positive, evidence-based content in sensitive areas such as pregnancy, health and grief. There could be more transparency around why users are seeing certain content (with an option to recalibrate when needed), and policymakers could put stronger safeguarding measures in place on sensitive topics.
“Helping users understand that their feeds are algorithmic constructions, not neutral mirrors of reality, can help them disengage from the spiral,” Inge says. “Pregnancy and early parenthood should be protected spaces online, but they’re treated as just another data point to monetise.”
For Ashcroft, the answer to the problem is complex. “One of the issues across the board is that the technology is developing at such a rate that legislation is slow to catch up,” she says. “But in this instance, I’m not sure where the onus lies. It could be on governments to legislate for accurate information on social media, but that sounds scarily like censorship. Some social media platforms are incorporating factchecking into their platforms with AI, but these are sometimes inaccurate and hold certain biases.” Using the “I’m not interested in this” feature could help, she suggests, “but even this will not be entirely successful. The main advice I would give is to reduce your use of social media.”
At the start of the year, my baby arrived. She was healthy, and I could finally take a breath. But the relief was short-lived. In the months since my pregnancy ended and motherhood began, the content on my feeds has shifted to the new fears I could face. When I open Instagram, the suggested reels that now appear include: A video on “What NOT to do when your baby wakes up 20 minutes into their nap”; another of a baby in a carrier overlaid with the text “THIS IS REALLY NOT SAFE”; and a clip of a toddler with a piece of Lego in its mouth with the warning: “This could happen to your child if you don’t know how to act.”
Is there a chance that this content makes me a better, more diligent and informed parent? Perhaps some of it does. But at what cost? The recent Online Safety Act has forced us to face our societal responsibility to protect vulnerable groups when they browse online. But as long as the constant, lingering threat of doom, despair and misinformation haunts the smartphones of new and expectant mothers, while social media companies monetise their fears, we are failing in this duty.
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