Feed

Your Phone in the Back Seat

A Drive to the Cinema, a Trailer and a Queasy Stomach

In a social feed, a video can start playing on its own as it scrolls into view.1 This is one of those drives, in Nadia’s back seat.

  • Reddit starts videos and GIFs playing as they scroll past in the feed. Its app keeps the switch for it under Media & animations, with three choices: Always, Only on Wi-Fi or Never.1
  • X plays videos and GIFs on its own in timelines, and the setting in the X app is kept apart from the one on X.com.2
  • Motion sickness can come from real motion or from motion that is only seen, when what the senses report does not match what the body expects.3
Elena in the back seat of the car looking at her phone, its light on her lap, with Nadia driving in the front and the sunset streaking past the windows

Elena looks up the disaster film on the way

Nadia is driving them to the cinema, and Elena has the back seat to herself. She opens Reddit to see what people thought of the film. As she scrolls, a trailer starts playing in one post, then a clip in the next, each one moving before she has stopped on it, while the road slides past the window.

Elena in the back seat scrolling her phone while the car follows a long curve, the road bending through the window beside her

Elena keeps scrolling as the car turns

She switches to X. In the timeline, every video starts as it comes into view: the trailer again, a street interview, a goat on a garden wall. The car takes a long bend onto the highway, and Elena’s stomach turns before she notices she has been looking down the whole time.

Elena leaning her head against the car window with her phone put away, while Nadia drives in the front seat

Elena puts the phone away before the parking lot

She opens Facebook to check the showtime on the cinema’s page, and on the way a workout video in her feed starts playing by itself. Elena locks the phone and leans her head against the window. Nadia asks if she is all right. Elena says she is fine and keeps her eyes on the horizon until they pull into the parking lot.

Twenty minutes into the drive

Elena had taken the moving feed for the price of looking at a phone in a car. She had no idea Reddit, X and Facebook each kept a switch of their own for it, Reddit’s in Media & animations, X’s in Data usage and Facebook’s in Media.

True to you

What your phone does is up to you. We think so too. So we built TrueTo to make every app behave the way you do. That’s what true to you means.

TrueTo goes into each app and changes the setting the way you would. Every one of them is reversible, one at a time.

Get TrueTo

Elena looks up the disaster film on the way

If Elena had used TrueTo, it would have gone into Reddit, X and Facebook and turned off autoplay in each for her.

Elena keeps scrolling as the car turns

With Video autoplay set to Never in X, each video would have held still in the timeline until she tapped it.

Elena puts the phone away before the parking lot

After the film, each switch would have been hers to turn back on, in its own app, with everything else left as it was.

Autoplay

In Reddit, under Settings and then Media & animations, Elena can set Autoplay Video Previews to Never herself.1 In X, under Settings and privacy, then Accessibility, display, and languages, then Data usage, she can set Video autoplay to Never.2 In Facebook, under Settings and then Media, she can set Autoplay to Never Autoplay Videos.4

Sources

  1. Reddit, “Accessibility Guides: Reduce Motion & Autoplay,” Reddit Help, read October 12, 2026.
  2. X, “How to share and watch videos on X,” X Help Center, read October 12, 2026.
  3. Takov, Veronica, and Prasanna Tadi, “Motion Sickness,” StatPearls, July 3, 2023.
  4. Wirth, Jordan, “How To Turn Off Autoplay Videos On Facebook, YouTube, Netflix, Bluesky, And More,” SlashGear, August 20, 2026.