Today, we live in a world of “clickbait,” defined as online content with sensationalized or misleading headlines designed to exploit curiosity and drive web traffic. Examples of clickbait titles include:
- “You Won’t Believe What Happened Next!”
- “Scientists Issue SHOCKING Warning!”
- “This Changes EVERYTHING!”
- “Nobody Saw This Coming: New Research Reveals a Disturbing Trend That Could Affect Millions of Americans”
Clickbait formula is pretty simple — make something sound frightening, crazy, outrageous, surprising, controversial or unbelievable, and people are more likely to click. Next, the creator of clickbait is positively reinforced for the clickbait, gets paid for the volume of traffic that clicked, and is encouraged to go back and — you guessed it — create more clickbait!
But instead of wondering why so much online content has become sensationalized to be clicked on, maybe we should ask something considerably more important: Where does all of this eventually lead us?
Are we better informed, or more prone to misleading information that can have a direct effect on our mental health and overall well-being?
The impact of clickbait
The internet created an economy in which attracting human attention has enormous value. Websites, social-media platforms, influencers, and news organizations need readers. Algorithms then learn what attracts us and provide more of it. Unfortunately, human beings aren’t naturally attracted to thoughtful, nuanced or important information, but we are drawn to novelty, danger, conflict, outrage, scandal and surprise.
And therein lies the problem. The information most likely to capture our attention isn’t necessarily the information most deserving of it.
Perhaps the most concerning of our attraction to scandalous clickbait is the illusion that all this information makes us better informed. Someone can spend hours scrolling through news headlines, TikTok videos, X posts, Facebook stories, YouTube clips and other online content and feel extraordinarily knowledgeable about what’s happening in the world. But exposure to information isn’t the same thing as understanding it, or validating it as authentic and truthful.
Knowing that 50 supposedly outrageous things happened today doesn’t necessarily mean all of it is true, or that we understand any of the stories we read. We may be consuming more information than any generation in human history while vetting less of it, and understanding increasingly less about what we consume.
That doesn’t necessarily mean clickbait is making us less intelligent. The greater concern may be that it encourages shallower thinking: reading headlines instead of articles, reacting before investigating, forming conclusions without context, and allowing emotional responses to substitute for careful thought.
There is another potential consequence. When people repeatedly discover that sensational headlines exaggerate what actually happened, healthy skepticism can gradually become cynicism. Eventually, instead of questioning questionable information, people may simply conclude that nothing can be trusted.
Assuming all information is the same, or that no information is credible, leaves us in a very dangerous spot. When credible journalism, scientific research, political propaganda, influencer speculation, satire, misinformation and outright fabrication now compete for our attention on many of the same screens are all jumbled together it requires us to distinguish what is legitimate, and what isn’t. This requires patience and critical thinking, but none of that is needed when we just click away on sensational headlines.
With clickbait, it’s rather easy: Don’t investigate. Just react.
Final thoughts
There may be a psychological cost to living in an information environment constantly telling us that something is wrong, dangerous, outrageous, or urgently deserving of our attention. Even when individual stories are relatively insignificant, the cumulative effect can leave us feeling more anxious, angry, overwhelmed, and pessimistic about the world around us — hardly a recipe for good mental health and well-being. Perhaps the most uncomfortable part is that we’re not merely victims of clickbait culture — we’re helping create it.
Every click teaches an algorithm something about what captures our attention. We click sensational content, platforms give us more of it, creators become increasingly sensational, and thoughtful information struggles even harder to compete. Clickbait began as a strategy for getting people to open a story, but its ultimate consequences may prove considerably larger.
Maybe we aren’t becoming a less informed society, but instead becoming something equally troubling: a society with unprecedented access to information and a diminishing ability to determine which information actually matters.
drstankovich.com
