Okay, I admit it. I’ve spent countless hours of my life being sucked in by clickbait––I’ve absolutely needed to know the 17 Fifth Harmony dance moves that perfectly sum up high school, what could happen if I use 50 bathbombs at once, seen the three ingredient pancakes I must try and taken the quiz on which nice Jewish celebrity I should date.
Social media site Buzzfeed is notorious for its use of clickbait, commonly seen as titles or headlines that lure the reader into clicking on the story by saying that it contains the “one superfood secret everyone must know” or the “crazy adorable” style a toddler created for his mother.
Is clickbait fun? Absolutely. Thanks to Buzzfeed, I can tell you that my dream Jewish celebrity is Drake, learned countless connections between Pixar movies, and looked at more enticing food pictures than I can mentally handle.
But, here’s the negative part. News agencies––professional news agencies like CNN––have taken to using clickbait headlines in order to attract more readers online.
There’s a point where business and pleasure should not mix, and when a professional agency is getting its cues from a website with articles entitled “Which Silly Cartoon Would You Rather Date,” it’s time to redefine the boundary.
The CNN homepage is crowded with headlines such as “Ex-pastor’s double life motive for murder?” and “Mom’s photo leads to horrifying discovery,” which are headlines aimed not at conveying information but rather at promoting web traffic.
Yes, it seems morally wrong for a professional news organization to be putting interest over direct validity, but the main problem with such professional clickbait headlines are that they tend to oversimplify an issue that may be more complex than what meets the eye.
For example, CNN recently published an article entitled “Millennials leaving church in droves, study finds.” The severity of the word “droves” embedded in the clickbait headline may immediately draw a reader to see just how drastic the religious shift for millennials really is.
In reality? The shift observed in millennial religious preference as cited by the “study” mentioned in the headline shows a decline of about six percent in Christianity between 2007 and 2014. A five to six percent difference––about 4.8 million of the estimated 80 million millennials––is hardly “leaving church in droves.”
Clickbait headlines can also simply be misleading, as shown in the CNN article ‘What’s in a disease name?” Though the headline implies content about how diseases are named or what components of a disease name mean, the article actually discusses new World Health Organization recommendations for naming diseases.
Headlines not matching up with content simply discards reader interest in favor of increased profits from web traffic and, in many occasions, the general truth and complexities of a situation.
Readers should not be mislead by the gross oversimplifications that clickbait are host to. Rather, professional-level conveyance of information should reflect fact and truth, not compound vague titles with subjective viewpoints.
