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By Wisley Lau

Correction: the threat of misinformation and clickbait in an eyeball seeking society

Did that headline grab your attention and make you click into this article? Chances are the statement I made is technically true — however, contrary to what you may have assumed, this article is actually about the problems with attention-seeking media, misinformation, and its potential impacts on society. 

Let’s start by discussing clickbait. Clickbait is a text or link that aims to attract viewers to click and read a certain article or video. The title of this article is an example of clickbait, as the title states something outrageous and ultimately misleading to exploit your sense of emotion and incentivise you to click into an article. Clickbait is often generated to gain viewership, especially in gossip and entertainment, but there has been an increasing usage of it in news media. 

Many online sites - sometimes even reputable journalistic sources - use clickbait to attract people on partisan lines. For example, a conservative website in the United States could create a clickbait headline about Joe Biden’s failure in Afghanistan, and since people have a confirmation bias toward ideas and opinions they like, there is a greater chance that these audiences will click on the clickbait article and read more stories from the same website. 

Sometimes the article’s content isn’t even related to the clickbaited title. Clickbait’s one and only goal is to seduce the reader with a headline they might be interested in before the reader consciously clicks on the link. So journalistic integrity or quality content comes secondary to clickbait authors. At best, clickbait articles are annoyances to people surfing the internet, but at worst, they can cause real societal harm by the power of misinformation.

Misinformation did not start in the digital age, but it certainly blossomed with the invention of social media and the internet. Clickbait may generate misleading and false information in the headlines, but the misinformation tidal wave is far worse than an eyeball attraction. Many un-credible news sites, especially far-right conservative news sources, have a history of providing dubious sources from unqualified individuals that are written or presented in a biased and misleading manner. This lures readers into a twister of lies, which continually grows over time until the reader only accepts information sowed by fake stories. 

Web media is not the only battleground of lies, however — social media further fans the flames of misinformation. When social media algorithms emphasise content aligned with users’ political beliefs, they are more likely to recommend these resources to others who believe in the same political ideology, thereby creating echo chambers and media bubbles. These media bubbles are troubling when considering how their main diet of information is often based on fake news, which not only perpetuates toxic partisanship, but can cause real-world damage. 

Outside forces can also manipulate information and deliberately spread lies to the public to create social and political chaos. It is alleged Russia, for example, interfered in the 2016 US election by injecting thousands of fake stories from Russian troll farms, with users pretending to be American spreading articles with false claims ranging from voter fraud to Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Looking at the news today, misinformation has invaded every single corner of the digital space. 

In the COVID-19 pandemic, misinformation about the virus created anti-mask mandate protests and citizen defiance against government coronavirus protocols, resulting in the needless deaths of individuals. After the COVID vaccine was released to the public, speculative misinformation about the ingredients and effects of the vaccine created a boom in anti-vaxxers. Misinformation spread mainly via social media and the internet has created political discord, polarization, and racial tensions between citizens and even those you love. Real global issues like climate change demand a collective response, but doubts over man-made climate change make it harder for the discussion to move on and provoke real change. More recently, in 2021, a mob attacked the US capitol based on unsupported claims of a rigged election by then-President Donald Trump and his supporters. 

So how do we solve this debacle of misinformation and clickbait? Before governments and the media can mend these problems, we, as citizens, should have basic media literacy. When reading a sensational article, check the source to see if it is trustworthy. Always be dubious of what you read — credible news sources often provide hyperlinks in the article for you to further verify the validity of its sources. Before sharing an article with someone else, consider the credibility of the material and research to see if the topic is being covered by other credible news websites. These are the basics of media literacy: as a wise person once said, “a fact-check a day, keeps the misinformation away.”

In the end, compared to the consequences of a fact-free world, maybe the truth isn’t so bad after all.

Image courtesy of stevepb @ pexels