Es Selamun Aleykum ve Rahmetullahi ve Berakatuh
Bismillah.

Today, whether we like it or not, almost all of us use social media platforms in one way or another.
Some of us to research something, some to learn new things, some to follow the agenda, and some to have fun.
Some of us produce content while others consume it.
In short, almost everyone is present on social media in some way.
And from time to time, even the most utilitarian among us may browse social media to unwind.
As long as it is limited, conscious, and controlled, we cannot call it entirely harmful.
However, there is a danger that has been rapidly increasing, especially over the past few years.
Short content.

The internet is an immense technology that provides everyone with access to all corners of the world.
Social media platforms, on the other hand, make this access much more comfortable and easy.
Moreover, they mostly offer this service for free.
But ultimately, these platforms also need to earn money in some way.
They do this not by taking money directly from you, but by showing you advertisements, by getting you to use their platforms, or by selling your personal information to various third parties, primarily advertising companies.
These are things everyone already knows.
However, there are some points that are right before people's eyes and that they generally do not notice.
These platforms and applications must keep you—the users—engaged with them as much as possible.
Because the more you use a platform or application, the more profit they make.
And they use various tricks to achieve this.
In fact, most large technology companies have large teams consisting of expert sociologists, psychologists, and similar professionals working solely for these purposes.

And these methods are so widespread today that they exist even on most news pages.
For example, let's say you think you are reading news on a news site.
What happens when you reach the end of the article? Does the page end?
No, on the contrary, another article is immediately loaded without you having to do anything.
At first glance, doesn't this seem like a very small feature? What effect could it have?
But in reality, its effect is enormous.
Because normally, when you finish a piece of content, you need to choose among headlines and open that content through your own action.
And during this action and its duration, you are actually giving yourself an opportunity to think. Should I really look at this content?
However, the technology we call "infinite scrolling" handles everything itself, rendering your action unnecessary and not presenting you with that moment of decision.
In this case, leaving that site becomes much harder because you say "just one more piece of content, let me consume this and then I'll leave," but you are never allowed to reach that end.

Unfortunately, the situation today is much more complex than this.
Not only the platforms, but even the content creators on those platforms are in a race to get you to consume more of their content.
On the surface, you have free access to everything, but in reality, the platforms and the content on those platforms are in a fierce competition to engage you more.
For example, open YouTube and look. There are millions of pieces of content from thousands of content creators. Even as soon as you open the homepage, videos with quite attention-grabbing titles and curiosity-arousing thumbnail images appear before you. Even though resisting all of this is already difficult, when various traps such as sexuality, compelling music, clickbait (that is, drawing attention with exaggerated claims), and dopamine triggers enter the picture, keeping control becomes considerably harder. Even if you show great willpower and ignore the homepage to enter an educational video, the platform continues to distract you with various videos on the side and mixed comments at the bottom.
In fact, it is possible to block all of this with various browser extensions. For example, even a simple search like "YouTube homepage cleaner" can yield solutions.
On this matter, you can examine the recommended applications/extensions below:

• Unhook: (Free) A browser extension that aims to provide a cleaner YouTube experience by hiding distracting sections such as recommendations, Shorts, the homepage feed, comments, and similar features on YouTube. It is especially recommended if you spend a lot of time on social media and have difficulty controlling yourself. Even if you can control yourself, it is good for preventing your attention from being distracted.
• YouShield: (Free) An extension aimed at blocking distractions on YouTube, similar to Unhook. Although less advanced than Unhook, it can be preferred for its simpler structure and ease of use.
• StayFocusd: (Free) A browser extension that helps reduce distraction and time waste by limiting the time spent on specific websites. It collects information such as how much time you spend on which site and how many times you visit it. In this way, you can monitor and control the time you spend on the internet. You can also block websites you wish.
• ActivityWatch: (Open Source / Free) An open-source time tracking software that automatically tracks which applications and activities are used on the computer and for how long, helping to analyze time usage. It is a good tool for tracking which application you use and for how long, especially if you spend a lot of time in the digital environment and your attention is easily distracted or you cannot control yourself.

Much more could be said about these kinds of traps of the internet and the virtual world.
Because the topic concerns most of us and has many details, but the topic we will address in this article is not these.
The topic we want to address in this article is one of what is perhaps currently the most widespread and most dangerous among the traps of the internet:
Short content and Edits.

Short content refers to content that appears as "Reels" on Instagram, "Shorts" on YouTube, and directly as the main content structure on TikTok, generally prepared in a vertical 9:16 ratio suitable for mobile devices, and 2 minutes or shorter. Although YouTube allows "Shorts" content up to 3 minutes, most content creators generally do not create content this long(!) because consumers do not like it.

Short content first began to gain popularity around 2010 and became part of the internet culture of Generation Z and Generation Alpha. Snapchat allowed 10-second videos in 2012. Vine, founded in 2012 and becoming widespread in 2013, which limited videos to six seconds, helped short content gain mainstream popularity and enabled the birth of a new generation of celebrities. Instagram responded to Vine's popularity by adding 15-second video sharing in 2013. After Vine shut down in 2017, its significant users began making longer videos on YouTube. TikTok became the most widely used short video application in 2018. In 2021, YouTube launched YouTube Shorts, which hosts videos up to 60 seconds, in response to increasing competition with TikTok; this duration was increased to three minutes in October 2024. YouTube Shorts received over five trillion views in total within six months of its launch.

Short content has some differences compared to traditional content. First, short content is very suitable for advertisements and product placements. Due to their structure tied to their duration, short content is not suitable for in-depth topics. However, thanks to their ease of production and rapid consumption, they have a much broader creator portfolio compared to long content. Short content can be a segment of longer content, a summary of a topic or content, a brief informational piece, fan fiction, or standalone entertaining, educational, or otherwise content.

Producing short content is easy. Especially today, with the availability of quite user-friendly video editors even for mobile devices, it has become much easier. Short content does not tire the consumer, does not take up much of their time, and can convey the intended message faster and to more people. Additionally, short content can be beneficial by containing practical information and recipes, brief reminders, thought-provoking quotes, or entertaining content. Like almost every tool, short content has various benefits depending on its areas of use.

However, again like almost every tool, it can cause serious harm when misused. Although short content has certain benefits when used correctly, it also contains many harmful factors, and it may not be possible to isolate all of these harms even in the most beneficial content. It is worth examining the main dangers of short content:

Due to their limited duration and rapid consumption, short content is a serious problem for people's attention spans. Since consuming too much short content will shorten the brain's attention span and, due to the structure of short content, will program the brain to be pleasure-oriented, people who consume too much short content generally cannot concentrate their attention for long periods and cannot carry out long-term work and projects. Today, the majority of the greatly increasing "Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)" diagnoses are due to improper electronic device usage. Because in the virtual world, in general, people can access a wide variety of pleasure-inducers very effortlessly and quickly. These dopamine triggers can be digital games, movies, TV series, chat rooms, short content, social media, and many other things. A brain that constantly accesses cheap pleasure in this way learns this as the new normal and wants to live this way continuously. This situation causes problems compared to the dopamine triggers of the physical world that require patience, perseverance, and effort, and people begin to have difficulty in their daily lives. For example, in the past, a child needed to engage in a physical activity, take various actions, use their imagination, and spend time in order to have fun. On the other hand, today a child who has fun with electronic devices can get much more pleasure in a much shorter time by just looking at a screen without doing any of these. Moreover, this situation applies not only to children but also to adults. As a natural consequence of this situation, convincing the brain, which has become accustomed to accessing pleasure through short and quick ways, of long, difficult, and boring processes becomes harder, and today this situation is mostly diagnosed as ADHD and various chemical medications are given, as if anesthetizing the brain. The effects of these medications even on healthy individuals are debatable, and although they may work in limited and genuine ADHD cases, the treatment of ADHD and misdiagnosed ADHD is mostly not intervening in the brain with chemicals, but gradually training the brain according to the realities of the physical world; however, since this is not the topic of our article, we end this topic here. Those who are curious will see why ADHD diagnoses have increased today and the harms of medications used in ADHD treatment and that their benefits are actually debatable if they research the topic. On the other hand, it is worth adding that pleasures obtained through easy means can never replace the pleasures of success achieved by overcoming real difficulties. Moreover, while the former harms you rather than benefiting you, the latter is the exact opposite and is beneficial to you.

Since short content is prepared to attract the user's attention within a limited time, it is primarily designed to trigger dopamine, the pleasure hormone. In addition, the "swiping" method offered by short content platforms to facilitate and accelerate consumption both allows the user to effortlessly pass from one piece of content to another, takes the search and selection mechanism out of their hands, and presents good and bad content together, triggering a reward mechanism in the user. Because the brain constantly prefers good content to appear among bad content rather than good content appearing constantly, as this adds a sense of excitement and discovery to the process. This is actually one of the fundamental reasons why gambling is addictive. It is not always winning, but the combination of losing and winning and the drive to maintain the behavior with the expectation that the next time will be better. Since short content works on the same logic, it can be seriously addictive and, despite their short duration, can hold people captive much more than long content. In addition to this, the structures of short content prepared to attract attention also trigger dopamine. When all of these come together and, on top of that, unrelated or low-quality content also enters the feed, the situation worsens further. For example, a brain that sees a short piece of scientific information, then a sad movie clip, then religious content, immediately followed by an action movie scene, then an exciting sports competition, and is exposed to all these unrelated, attention-grabbing, short, and fragmented pieces of content, with its dopamine constantly triggered, and with advertisements and nonsense data also entering in between, will over time experience difficulties in cognitive functions. So much so that this situation can initially lead to short content addiction in the person, then to spending their days with short content and being unable to enjoy anything else, over time to becoming desensitized to life, events, people, and everything else, and in later stages to distancing themselves from everything and everyone. Because a brain that is constantly exposed to what is essentially a dump of messages in this way cannot produce an immediate reaction to each piece of content, so over time it will prefer to remain unresponsive to them. In addition to this, the constantly fed dopamine will no longer be enough, and the person will develop a constant need for more dopamine, which in turn will cause the person to constantly consume much more extreme and excessive content. This situation actually applies to almost all addictions. Because any harmful but pleasure-giving action may provide the expected pleasure the first time it is done, but over time the brain will become accustomed to this pleasure level and accept it as the normal level, so the same amount will no longer provide the same pleasure. In this case, people fall into a hunger for pleasure and increase the dose of the harmful thing through which they obtain that pleasure. And this cycle continues in this way. As the bar is raised higher each time, the hunger for pleasure increases rather than decreases, and it begins to feel like an obligation to people. This situation also causes them to become aggressive in order to obtain that harmful thing. What we have listed applies to known harmful things like drugs, as well as to everything that is addictive to a person. This is not always drugs. Cigarettes, alcohol, sexual urges, and gambling are among the most well-known harmful things. In addition to these, games, movies, TV series, social media, and short content can also be as dangerous as other harmful things when they reach the level of addiction. Even reading books can become an addiction and be harmful if it is done not to gain knowledge but just to have read a book, if it draws people in too much, takes up too much of their time, and disrupts their lives. It is worth making the following distinction here. A person doing or using something a lot for the sake of learning knowledge, practicing a profession, or for specific purposes does not directly make that thing harmful. However, if something does not lead the person to a real purpose, if the person feels compelled to it despite not being obliged, cannot do without it, constantly thinks about it, becomes aggressive when they cannot access it and constantly seeks ways to access it, if it disrupts the person's life and takes up a large portion of their time and has no benefit for the person, if the person does it to escape their problems or to satisfy their craving for it and has no control over it, that thing may have turned into a harmful addiction for that person, and the person may even strongly deny this situation; however, addictions are a burden in people's lives. Therefore, it would be beneficial for everyone to look at themselves from a distance and check whether there is anything in their behavior as we have described. If you have any addiction and cannot overcome it on your own, you must definitely seek help. Because if you do not bring that addiction under control, sooner or later it may completely control you.

Returning to our topic, in addition to the general harms of short content listed above, there are also content-based harms. Due to the ease of production of short content, there are many short content creators and, accordingly, a great deal of short content. The majority of existing short content consists of consumption-oriented, misinformation-containing, useless, absurd, and harmful content. In fact, among them are immoral or crime-containing or crime-encouraging content, and content with absurdities reaching the level of what is called "brainrot" in today's terms, literally melting the brain. Naturally, the people who consume these cannot be expected to think and behave healthily. In addition to this, since short content generally does not cite sources due to limited duration, it can contain a lot of fake, incorrect, or at best decontextualized information. Furthermore, almost all beneficial short content aims to provide bite-sized information to people and does not delve into the depths of matters. However, consumers may fall into the misconception that they have fully learned the topic by consuming short content, and this can lead to a perception of false intellectualism. But this does not mean that even beneficial short content is harmful. On the contrary, among short content, there can be truly practical, memorable, thought-provoking, or deep information. However, the majority of the content pool unfortunately consists of content that is the opposite of this.

There is also a type of short content that should be especially avoided, which, in addition to all the dangers of short content, has its own bad aspects. These short content we are talking about are called "Fan Edit" or, in short, just "Edit." The word "edit" is an English word meaning to arrange. The word editorship also comes from this. To define content called "Edit" briefly, they are clips prepared by fans of something about that thing. Edits can be about almost anything and there are many different preparation methods. For example, an edit can be prepared by cutting and combining the important or photogenic moments of a character in a film, or just one scene of a film can be prepared as an edit or clip. Edits generally use various filters to increase visual impact, special music is chosen to put the viewer into the emotion the editor wants to convey, and generally a collage is prepared from the most suitable moments of the thing being edited and all of them are combined and presented as short content. Although edits began to gain popularity along with short content, they have increased significantly especially since around 2020. Fan edits are today an important market with commercial significance. So much so that today individuals, institutions, and companies make agreements with editors for the advertising or propaganda of things they want to promote. Because edits, with their striking, impressive, and attention-grabbing nature, can attract even people who are unaware of or uninterested in the subject, and thanks to their easy and rapid production and consumption, they can spread quickly and reach very large masses. For this reason, today edits are not just simple fan fiction or clips, but on the contrary, they are an immensely dangerous tool that can be used to multiply and spread any desired idea or message to the masses. This tool, depending on who uses it, can be a marketing or defamation tool, a constructive or destructive idea for society. In other words, edits can actually be both a rose and a weapon.

Edits are perhaps among the most widespread and most dangerous of short content. Because edits first use carefully selected music and filters to be much more impressive. This situation, combined with the structure of the short content industry, which is generally pleasure-oriented, becomes much more dangerous. Edits can bring the viewer to the desired state instantly, despite their short structure, by combining clips suitable for the emotion to be conveyed, camera angles, montages, effects, filters, and music. In addition to these, since they are prepared by selecting only the moments related to the subject of the thing being edited, they do not reflect a complete picture of the relevant thing. On the contrary, they draw a picture of the relevant thing only in the way the editor wants to show. This situation is very important especially in terms of being able to create a first impression in the desired direction through edits in people who are unrelated to the subject. For example, a few properly prepared edits about a film you have never watched are more than enough to convince you that the good guy is the bad guy. Moreover, if this is done with the right techniques and in large numbers, even if the person learns the inner truth of the matter, a doubt may remain in their mind, or worse, they may be led to prefer their first impression. Edits are a very dangerous tool that allows you to present anything in any way you wish. With edits, you can portray a criminal as a victim, a hero as a criminal, the loser as the winner, and the winner as the loser. Moreover, you can do this very quickly and effectively and spread it. These may seem like great exaggerations to you, but if you browse the internet, you can see that unimaginable things are made into edits and shown sympathetically, which wrongs are shown as rights and rights as wrongs through edits, and winners are portrayed as losers and losers as winners. So much so that if you are exposed enough to edits contrary to your moral ideas and values that you believe will never change, you can see that your supposedly unshakable values begin to be shaken as a result of poisoning yourself.

After all the warnings and dangers throughout the article, it may seem like a contradiction that we or other good people produce short content, or even make various edits. However, at this point, it should be stated that, as we have mentioned throughout the article, both short content and edits can be harmful as well as beneficial in the hands of the person using them. As Islamic Source, we share short content and edits. However, while sharing these contents, we try to ensure that the information we provide is correct, avoid clickbait titles and images, do not publish harmful or incorrect content, and do not put toxic pleasure traps in our content. However, despite all this, we also accept that we cannot eliminate all the harms inherent in the structure of short content. However, at this point, we publish short content and edits because we think the possible benefits outweigh the harms. First of all, unfortunately, short content and edits are very widespread all over the world today. Moreover, this is the case even though most content is low-quality or harmful. At this point, by sharing beneficial content, we try to spread goodness, aim to use the effects of short content and edits in a good direction, and aim to draw people from harmful content to beneficial content. Because short content can reach many more people very quickly. In this case, in an age where evil is so widespread, we choose to use the speed of this tool to spread goodness. In addition, while doing this, we warn and aim to raise awareness of people against the harms of short content and edits, and we also strive to produce long content. In other words, to summarize, we accept the possible harms of short content and edits in order to use these powerful weapons in spreading goodness. Moreover, while doing this, we strive to minimize possible harms as much as possible and warn and raise awareness of people on this matter. We believe that other beneficial content should also be handled in this way.

The main thing we can do while consuming short content and edits is to be conscious. If we are conscious, control will be in our hands and we will decide how much we will watch and we will not be doing "Doomscrolling (mindless scrolling, that is, consuming content uncontrollably by scrolling without awareness)," and we will not be exposed to harmful and empty content by evaluating and selecting the content we watch ourselves, and we will be able to truly benefit from beneficial content. On this matter, rather than relying solely on our own will, in order to prevent possible violations, we can block distractions with applications and extensions such as YouShield, and we can bring our screen time under control with tools such as StayFocusd. Instead of consuming beneficial short content uncontrollably and scrolling through many harmful contents until reaching beneficial content, we can follow beneficial content creators and consume their short content. In addition to this, not consuming short content from mobile devices, especially tablets and phones, and consuming short content only through computers is among the leading measures that can be taken. Because mobile devices are devices that are often with us and accessible in almost any environment and position, consuming short content through them can be much more uncontrolled. For this reason, consuming short content from a computer is both more limited and more controlled.

To summarize the topic, short content is a type of content that has many benefits, more harms, and various dangers. Edits, on the other hand, are among the most dangerous and harmful forms of short content. Short content and edits can be addictive, can harm mental functions, and can spread harmful ideas. Short content may not be able to address topics in depth. As in all matters, moderation should be observed in this matter as well. Short content should be produced and consumed in a controlled, limited, and conscious manner. While consuming short content, too much content should not be consumed, too many independent topics should not be consumed at the same time, beneficial and correct content should be consumed while consuming short content, information in short content should be verified, and short content should not be preferred for delving into the depths of a topic. Especially staying away from edits is very important for people's spiritual and mental health. Absurd and empty short content should also not be consumed. Various applications and extensions can be used to limit short content and make consumption controlled.

As we end our article, we apologize for it being so long and thank you very much for reading this far. We felt the need to dwell on this topic in detail because it is a very important topic as it is very widespread today, is taken lightly, and as a result causes negative effects in people's lives. InshaAllah we have been successful. You too can share your positive or negative views on the topic with us.

If we have been correct, this is only from ALLAH. If we have made a mistake, this is only from ourselves. InshaAllah it has been beneficial.
With the wish that it be a means to good. We await your good prayers.
Selamun aleykum.