City of Reno to Residents: Stop Doomscrolling and Sign Up for More Alerts

City of Reno Social Media post.

In a June 5, 2025 Facebook post encouraging residents to sign up for emergency alerts, the city offered some unsolicited life advice: stop doomscrolling on your phones. Because nothing says "quit your doom-and-gloom scrolling habit" quite like signing up for government emergency notifications that will ping your device.

It's June—graduation season, wedding season, the time when Reno actually remembers it has beautiful weather. Yet somehow the city's communications team decided this sunny month was the perfect time to assume their residents are all trapped in endless cycles of bad news consumption.

Here's the thing: How exactly does City Hall know what we're doing on our phones? Are they monitoring our scroll patterns? Did they conduct a secret survey of Reno residents' social media habits? Or did someone in the communications department just project their own late-night Twitter spiral onto the entire city?

The mixed message is almost poetic. "Hey Reno, stop obsessing over negative news feeds. Instead, let us send you push notifications about every potential disaster heading your way."

Maybe the real doomscrolling was the emergency alerts we signed up for along the way.

To be fair, emergency preparedness is important. But telling people to quit doomscrolling while simultaneously asking them to opt into anxiety-inducing alert systems? That's either brilliant psychology or a complete lack of self-awareness.

We're going with the latter.