It’s time to put an end to clickbait content

My friend Caren shook her head and looked at me. “I feel cheated,” she said, placing her phone on the table. She had clicked on a link on Facebook that was headlined “8 bad business habits you should drop in 2019”. She lamented how the headline misled her to read what she already knew. Clickbait.

We have all been inveigled by such eye-catching headlines that promise much then disappoint. Social media posts are being crafted with such cunning sensationalism that you find yourself clicking on links that are not worth your time. All this effort is geared towards generating clicks that eventually get monetised for the benefit of the owner(s) of the site. The higher the clicks, the higher the charge for online adverts.

While the model may work for sites that have quality content, it backfires for sites that reject quality content in favour of sensationalism.

BuzzFeed had to lay off 218 employees to boost the company’s profitability by “[focusing] on content that is working” because audiences get fed up with a particular pattern of reporting issues.

What angers readers is the dishonesty that comes with the titles. Some use photos and videos out of context. Others use names of popular people and locations to hook readers. However, lies have the biggest potential to damage trust and relationships.

While I acknowledge that the power of digital data and audience analytics have revolutionised journalism, clickbait culture is an insult to the tenets of news reporting and analysis.

Clickbait is a menace to journalism. It obliterates well-researched work in support of maintaining high web traffic.

It also comes from citizen journalists, freelancers, bloggers and vloggers who have no time to give readers concrete, balanced and well-researched content.

The media’s role of providing checks and balances to the ruling class is gradually fading as we allow clickbait to take us to the point where content is defined by its degree of sensationalism.

The mushrooming of news websites around the world has been a curse, as most of them use their Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube accounts to spread yellow journalism.

Don’t these sites realise they can fetch more traffic when they break verified news, do quality analysis on societal issues and investigate key stories and employ credibility in their writing?

Any day, believability and balance is more sustainable than sensationalism and bias. Readers need informative copy, not a headline that does not live up to its ‘drama’.

It’s time we amended our Computer and Cyber Crimes 2018 law to include penalties for websites that upload clickbait content. This would protect us, our children and future generations from this social media disaster.