This is Part 2 of our series on how algorithms shaped Generation Z. In Raised by Machines: How Algorithms Shaped an Entire Generation (part 1), we explored how tech giants hijacked child development. In this part, we examine the business models that made mental health struggles profitable.

There’s a reason Generation Z’s mental health crisis looks the way it does. It wasn’t shaped by random societal changes or inevitable generational shifts—it was crafted by some of the most sophisticated behavioral design teams in human history, all working toward a single goal: keeping you engaged at any psychological cost.

The platforms that raised Gen Z discovered something profoundly disturbing early in their evolution: human misery is more profitable than human happiness. Anxiety keeps you scrolling longer than contentment. Fear generates more clicks than security. Envy drives more engagement than satisfaction. This wasn’t a bug they tried to fix—it became the foundation of their entire business strategy.

Gen Z is more likely to self-diagnose based on social media content than older generations, but this isn’t a coincidence or a character flaw. It’s the inevitable outcome of algorithms learning that mental health content generates massive engagement, then flooding vulnerable developing minds with exactly that content in increasingly intense doses.

When Suffering Became the Product

The tech industry made a discovery that changed everything: negative emotional states are stickier than positive ones. When you’re angry, anxious, envious, or inadequate, you don’t just scroll—you compulsively scroll, searching for something to ease the discomfort these platforms deliberately created.

This realization fundamentally transformed platform development. Instead of optimizing for user wellbeing or authentic connection, engineers began optimizing for “engagement”—a sanitized corporate term for psychological capture. Every feature, every algorithmic tweak, every interface design choice was tested against one metric: does it make people stay longer?

For Gen Z, whose entire psychological architecture was constructed during peak platform optimization, this meant growing up in environments specifically calibrated to generate and exploit emotional distress. Their worldview, self-concept, and emotional patterns weren’t just influenced by social media—they were engineered by it.

The Platform Playbook: Exploitation by Design

Each major platform discovered its own method for extracting maximum attention from developing minds. Together, they created a comprehensive system for psychological manipulation that Gen Z had no defense against.

Instagram: The Inadequacy Engine

Instagram didn’t accidentally create a comparison culture—comparison was the product. The platform’s entire architecture revolves around curated visual perfection that makes everyone feel like they’re falling short.

The infinite scroll isn’t a convenience feature—it’s a trap that ensures there’s always someone more attractive, more successful, more interesting than you. The algorithmic feed learned to surface content that triggers your specific insecurities, serving you an endless stream of evidence that you’re not enough.

Gen Z internalized this comparison mechanism during the exact developmental period when they were forming their sense of self-worth. They didn’t choose to measure themselves against impossible standards—Instagram taught them that external validation through visual performance was how worth is determined.

TikTok: Manufacturing Mental Illness

While TikTok fosters community, it often trivializes serious mental health conditions by reducing them to trending hashtags and oversimplified symptom lists. But the real damage runs deeper than trivialization—the platform creates self-reinforcing spirals of pathology.

Here’s how it works: You watch one video about anxiety. The algorithm notes your engagement. It serves you ten more videos about anxiety. You watch those too, learning new symptoms, new labels, new reasons to believe something is fundamentally wrong with you. The algorithm interprets this as success and floods your feed with increasingly intense mental health content.

Within weeks, normal developmental struggles—the kind every generation experiences—begin to feel like serious disorders requiring diagnosis and intervention. The platform doesn’t just reflect mental health struggles; it actively creates them through algorithmic amplification of distress.

YouTube: The Extremism Escalator

YouTube’s recommendation engine operates on a simple principle: extreme content keeps people watching. Whatever initially captures your attention, the algorithm gradually leads you toward more intense, more radical, more consuming versions of that interest.

Start with a video about healthy eating, and within a month you’re deep into orthorexia content. Search for help with focus issues, and you’re soon watching videos about severe ADHD. Express interest in social justice, and the algorithm guides you toward increasingly polarized political content.

Gen Z’s understanding of virtually every topic—from mental health to politics to relationships—was shaped by systems designed to radicalize their interests for profit. The moderation wasn’t “Am I interested in this?” but “Does this content generate enough watch time?”

The Self-Diagnosis Economy

Mental health content exploded on social media for one reason: it performs exceptionally well on every engagement metric that matters to platforms. It’s personal, emotionally intense, community-building, and infinitely shareable. Algorithms learned to recognize and amplify this content type above almost everything else.

TikTok therapy videos accumulate millions of views because they offer something irresistible to a struggling generation: simple answers to complex pain. But the algorithm doesn’t distinguish between helpful mental health education and harmful oversimplification. It simply serves whatever keeps you watching, sharing, commenting.

This created a perfect storm for Gen Z: a generation experiencing legitimate mental health struggles due to algorithm-induced development, being served an endless stream of content that pathologizes normal human experiences, creating a feedback loop of diagnosis-seeking behavior that generates even more engagement.

The platforms profit at every stage. The more you believe you’re mentally ill, the more content you consume seeking understanding. The more content you consume, the more data platforms collect about your vulnerabilities. The more they know your vulnerabilities, the better they can serve you content that exploits them.

Loneliness as a Business Model

Gen Z reports the highest loneliness rates in recorded history despite having unprecedented tools for connection. This isn’t paradoxical—it’s intentional design.

Real human connection threatens platform engagement. When you’re satisfied with your relationships, when you feel genuinely seen and understood, when you have deep bonds with people who know your unfiltered self—you spend less time on social media. You don’t need the platform to fill the void because there is no void.

But lonely people are profitable people. They scroll endlessly seeking connection they never find. They post desperately seeking validation that never satisfies. They curate performances hoping someone will see through to their authentic self, but the platform only rewards better performances.

The algorithms learned this pattern and optimized for it. Content that generates authentic connection gets less distribution than content that generates parasocial relationships. Features that would facilitate real friendship get deprioritized in favor of features that increase time on platform. Genuine vulnerability gets buried while polished performances get amplified.

Gen Z learned to socialize in environments that actively punish authentic connection and reward shallow performance. Then we wonder why they report feeling isolated despite being constantly “connected.”

The Data Extraction Machine

Every emotional response Gen Z had on these platforms generated valuable data. Every anxious scroll, every envious click, every desperate search for validation taught the algorithms exactly how to manipulate them more effectively.

This psychological profiling became incredibly sophisticated. Platforms don’t just know you’re interested in mental health—they know which specific symptoms trigger your strongest responses, what time of day you’re most vulnerable to certain content types, which emotional states make you most likely to engage, and exactly how to keep you teetering on the edge of distress without pushing you to disengage entirely.

This data becomes the blueprint for increasingly effective manipulation. Each generation of algorithms is better at exploiting psychological vulnerabilities than the last, trained on billions of data points collected from Gen Z’s emotional responses during their most vulnerable years.

The Profitable Pathology Pattern

Platforms discovered that content about mental health problems outperforms content about mental health solutions. Videos about anxiety symptoms get more views than videos about anxiety management. Posts about depression resonate more than posts about recovery. Crisis content spreads faster than stability content.

This created perverse incentives throughout the entire content creation ecosystem. Influencers learned that sharing struggles generates more engagement than sharing progress. Therapists found that discussing pathology attracts more followers than discussing wellness. Mental health brands realized that anxiety sells better than calm.

Gen Z has been swimming in an ocean of content that profits from their continued suffering while starving them of content that might actually help them recover. The platforms don’t want you to heal—healthy, content people scroll less.

Architecture of Addiction

The teams building these platforms weren’t naive college students stumbling into unintended consequences. They were neuroscientists, behavioral psychologists, and addiction specialists deliberately applying everything we know about compulsion and dependency to software design.

They implemented intermittent variable reward schedules—the same mechanism that makes gambling addictive—in the form of likes, comments, and notifications. They designed social validation systems that activate the same neural pathways as addictive substances. They created artificial urgency through features like Snapchat streaks and “last active” timestamps.

Every technique was deployed on developing brains during the exact period when those brains were most vulnerable to addiction formation. Gen Z wasn’t given a choice about whether to develop these patterns—the patterns were built into the environment where their psychology formed.

The Scale of Manipulation

What makes this particularly devastating isn’t just that it happened, but the scale at which it happened. This wasn’t a small study with a few hundred participants—this was the systematic psychological manipulation of an entire generation, conducted without consent, without oversight, and without any consideration of long-term consequences.

Every major tech company participated. They all employed similar teams of behavioral specialists. They all optimized for engagement over wellbeing. They all collected psychological data on minors. They all deployed increasingly sophisticated manipulation techniques as their algorithms learned what worked.

The mental health crisis we see in Gen Z isn’t mysterious or random—it’s exactly what you’d expect when you subject millions of developing minds to systems specifically designed to generate psychological dependence through emotional exploitation.

The Comparison Trap at Scale

Anxiety, despair, and low self-esteem have all been linked to the harmful impact of social media on Gen Z’s mental health, but these aren’t side effects—they’re core features of platforms designed around comparison.

Every scroll reveals someone more successful. Every post shows someone more attractive. Every story demonstrates someone living a better life. The algorithm ensures this by learning your specific insecurities and serving you content calibrated to trigger them.

Gen Z internalized comparison as the fundamental framework for understanding themselves. They didn’t develop this pattern because they’re shallow or insecure—they developed it because comparison was literally built into the architecture of the environments where they formed their identity.

Why This Was Inevitable

Given the business model—advertising revenue based on attention capture—everything that happened to Gen Z was inevitable. As long as profit depends on engagement, platforms will optimize for whatever psychological state generates maximum engagement, regardless of harm.

The mental health crisis isn’t a failure of the system—it’s proof the system worked exactly as designed. Tech companies successfully created a generation that can’t put their devices down, that measures worth through platform metrics, that experiences withdrawal from digital disconnection.

It is no wonder, then, that Gen Zers are more likely than their older counterparts to report feeling negative mental health effects from social media use. The wonder would be if they didn’t, given the sophistication and scale of the psychological manipulation they experienced during development.

In Part 3 of this series, “Breaking Free from Algorithmic Control: How Gen Z Can Heal and Protect Future Generations,” we’ll explore how Gen Z can recover from this systematic exploitation and create different patterns for themselves and future generations.

• Woods, H. C., & Scott, H. (2016). “Social media use and adolescent mental health.” Journal of Adolescence
• Hunt, M. G., et al. (2018). “Limiting social media decreases loneliness and depression.” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology
• Kelly, Y., et al. (2018). “Social media use and adolescent mental health.” The Lancet

• “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism” by Shoshana Zuboff
• “Digital Minimalism” by Cal Newport
• “The Distracted Mind” by Larry Rosen
• “Alone Together” by Sherry Turkle