Against the backdrop of social media becoming deeply embedded in everyday life and continuously reshaping cognitive structures and consumer decision-making pathways, Xiaohongshu has evolved into a major platform through which users obtain lifestyle advice and value judgments. However, beneath the appearance of a flourishing content ecosystem, a form of manipulative information characterized by high concealment and systematic harm has been spreading. This study conceptualizes such information as “cognitive-degrading content”, referring to content that imitates scientific discourse, logical reasoning, authoritative endorsement, and moral appeals as rational symbolic systems to construct an argumentation shell that appears rigorous but is in fact fallacious, thereby unconsciously weakening users’ critical thinking and evidence evaluation abilities. Based on a structured analysis of content forms, this study identifies five typical types of cognitive-degrading content: pseudo-scientific marketing and terminology accumulation, fallacious evaluations and the inducement of cognitive shortcuts, fabricated authority and selective quotation, extreme emotional manipulation accompanied by identity binding and conspiratorial attribution, and immersive fictional realities. To explain the mechanisms through which such content is continuously produced and algorithmically amplified, this study constructs a dual-level analytical framework spanning the micro and macro levels. At the micro level, dual-process theory is introduced to reveal how cognitive-degrading content systematically activates intuitive judgment associated with System 1 while suppressing rational scrutiny associated with System 2. At the macro level, drawing on perspectives from the attention economy and the political economy of algorithms, the study demonstrates that recommendation logics centered on completion rates and interaction volume structurally reward emotionalized content with low cognitive cost and high dramatic intensity, thereby forming a self-reinforcing diffusion cycle. Based on this diagnostic analysis, the study further proposes a multi-actor collaborative governance pathway, including algorithmic restructuring and the introduction of quality weighting at the platform level, benefit constraints and professional boundary norms at the creator level, and the enhancement of media literacy and participatory co-governance mechanisms at the user level. The theoretical contribution of this study lies in disentangling cognitive-degrading content from explanations grounded in individual moral deviance and reconstructing it as a structural information ecology problem jointly shaped by platform institutions, creators’ rational choices, and users’ cognitive constraints, thereby offering systematic policy implications for information governance on lifestyle-oriented platforms.
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Gan, W., Xiao, M., Zhang, N. (2025) Exploring the Formation Mechanisms and Preventive Strategies of Cognitive-Degrading Content on the Xiaohongshu Platform. Journal of Social Development and History, 1(3), 101-113. https://doi.org/10.71052/jsdh/YDTC2843