As one of those ‘hip young people’ that the older generations complain so much about, I tend to stay connected. I have Internet and a smartphone (though I don’t have data or invest in the Pokemon GO craze, so I may be a little out of the loop in that aspect). I spend a lot of time connected to social media of some sort, and the vast majority of my daily reading is of articles I find online.
After all, news websites lure you in with one story, and then once you see the related articles at the bottom of the page, you’re basically doomed to waste a few hours clicking on page after page, spiralling down into a neverending maze of content that ends with you looking dazedly up from the computer screen, wondering why it’s suddenly dark outside and why you’ve ended up reading about Uzi Geller, the Israeli chess master, when you originally clicked on an article to uncover what fantastically offensive thing Donald Trump said today.
When going through these content funnels, however, one must be cautious not to fall for the common Internet trap known as ‘clickbait articles.’ You may not know the term, but whether you’re an Internet master or someone who’s still trying to remember his or her Wi-Fi password, you’ve almost certainly seen them and know what they look like.
They’re very easy to spot when you know what to look for. Often there is a number somewhere in the title, used to represent how many ‘weird tricks’ or ‘amazing facts’ there are. The article will often claim to do something absolutely amazing, like make you more productive at work, or help you burn fat off like a supermodel, or otherwise change your entire life.
Some will try to appeal to you by being relatable. Look at these 27 truths that all mothers know, for example, or the 33 realities of living in Saskatchewan. Sometimes, these articles will even have access to location data, and will then convince you to click on the article because “Wow! Someone in my very town won one million dollars, and I can too!” Unfortunately, the only thing you usually win from these articles are a lot of pop-up advertisements and the occasional virus.
Articles involved in things like health and medicine will lure you in with a story about a woman who discovered an amazing way to look 50 years younger, or get the whitest teeth, or cure her own cancer. They’ll also emphasize the simplicity of the trick the woman used by saying in the title, “Dentists Hate Her!” or “Doctors Don’t Want You to Know About This!” They claim that the medical professionals are annoyed with her because she found out you could just eat orange peels instead of buying expensive treatments, when in reality they’re probably just annoyed that someone is flat-out lying about medical research.
Clickbait articles love to play with your emotions. They will often claim “You’ll Be Outraged,” “Your Heart Will Melt,” “Your Mind Will Be Blown” or “You’ll Literally Go Insane” after reading the article. People are encouraged to click on these because their morbid curiosity just can’t take it. They just have to know if they’re really going to feel that emotion just from reading the article! Unfortunately, I usually only find myself outraged that I was actually fooled into reading an article, and not because I was spurred into anger by a few simple words on a computer screen.
Now, I can’t exactly blame clickbait for being around, even if it does annoy me that I get fooled into reading it. A recent article on the website Cracked explained that content farms, companies that specifically publish articles designed to be picked up by search algorithms for having significant keywords in their titles, prey on desperate writers. The companies run on ad revenue, so they don’t care what’s being posted, so long as it generates a page for people to click on. That’s why they pay writers, who are desperate for cash to make ends meet, less than $20 per article. The best-case scenario for these writers is having to write four articles a day just to make minimum wage, but often, writers are paid far less, or are only promised payment based on ad revenue, so several articles including a number of random keywords have to be churned out fast. These poor people have to make up articles based on cobbled-together facts, or sometimes even post comments on these articles to generate more attention, just so they can feed themselves. It’s journalistic integrity at its finest.
I guess I don’t really have any way to deal with clickbait articles and content mills. I just have to hope that I can learn the signs of a fake article well enough to avoid it. I don’t want to put these people out of a job. I should just be glad I have a proper reporter job.
And what’s my ‘weird trick’ from the title, you ask? God, I don’t know. Stay in school!
