The rapid evolution of digital advertising, algorithmic personalization, and AI-generated content has intensified user exposure to persuasive communication across social media, search engines, news platforms, and emerging conversational systems. This rapid review synthesizes evidence from thirteen key studies published between 2024 and 2025, focusing on how constant exposure to targeted advertisements, microtargeting, dark patterns, offensive ads, and AI-generated misinformation may influence anxiety, cognitive and behavioral avoidance, digital well-being, and civic engagement. Findings reveal that mistargeted political ads may increase political cognition, detox interventions can reduce attention to ads, transparency disclosures have limited effectiveness due to cognitive overload, and AI-generated media labels reduce belief and engagement to varying extents. Exposure to negative media does not uniformly increase anxiety longitudinally, though climate stress can predict later civic engagement. Risks are amplified in conversational search environments due to trust and personalization. The review highlights methodological gaps such as limited longitudinal causal evidence, restricted contexts, and small evaluator samples in heuristic studies. Practical recommendations are proposed for policymakers, platforms, advertisers, and researchers to mitigate anxiety-related outcomes while supporting ethical persuasion and user autonomy.
Patel et al. (Thu,) studied this question.