this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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The issue is the way that news is consumed these days. You always used to have a catchy newspaper headline with a title to get you to buy it (extra extra read all about it insert catchy alliteration here) . People dont consume news. They dont read articles. They receive headlines and then immediately engage on some other website that profits off sharing this content.
Clickbate for all the woes exists because it works and people do click it. Or are more likely to click and share than if it was a dull informative headline. It's the same as on youtube. As long as the actual meat of the article is fine and the headline isnt too much of a BS article it doesnt bother me too much but of course there are limits to that.
There’s a difference between clickbait and misleading though. It probably often overlaps, but headlines can be clickbait without being misleading: "Doctors hate this one trick" isn’t really giving you wrong information. "Signal Denies Existence of Zero-Day Vulnerability on the App", however, strongly implies that Signal has a security flaw that it stubbornly refuses to fix, which harms the reputation of the App and isn’t at all true if you read the actual article.
That’s the main issue I’m having with these headlines. They‘re not just annoying, they’re spreading misinformation.