The Clickbait is Making You Anxious
How our voyeuristic tendencies are killing us
At any given moment, I can get on the website or app for my local news channel and find a number of stories that…aren’t local.
Shocking? Yes. Disturbing? Sometimes. Interesting? Well, yes! That’s why we click on them.
Right now the headline for one such story is about a mother in Chicago that killed her 12-year old son. That is a shocking headline. It’s a story that unnerves us. But I live in South Carolina. Why does that particular story matter to me?
How clickbait works
When we think of clickbait, we think of various forms. It’s the spammy email that sneaks through filters into our inbox. It’s the headline wedged in between other real headlines to make it seem like real news. It’s sensationalized topics, often with images that cause a double-take and we can’t help but click. But it’s also these real-life stories that stimulate our synapses and create interest in something that, in our own little worlds, is irrelevant.
I didn’t click on the Chicago murder mom story, though I’m sure the details would thrust me into despair. Even with the mother’s mugshot thumbnail placed right beside it, I didn’t click. Why?
I’ve been bamboozled enough. I’ve fretted away minutes (J/K…hours) on stories from all over the world that are either interesting or extremely tragic and, in either case, involve a story I have no need knowing.
The money-making side of it all is slick and sleazy, and Morning Brew did a recent deep-dive of how it all works. We’ve all seen targeted ads: you searched for a set of Shopkins for your daughter’s birthday, and now every site you go to is shoving toy ads in your face. And then there’s the, what I like to call “bottom-feeder” ads which are your standard clickbait links to sites bloated with ads. And your click makes that site and its advertisers all sorts of moolah. They’ll entice you with putting your state or even your town’s name in the headline: “Chicago offers 100% money back on this brand’s credit card!” or some similar nonsense. Then there’s “13 Most Paused Movie Scenes of All Time (Number 4 will shock you”. Well, now I have to click on it because what if number 4 is from a movie…
