Tomcat Kitten photo courtesy Pixabay.com / drazewski

Clickbait. That one word can open a fascinating can of worms in any discussion, should anyone care to sample the contents.

In researching this article through Wikipedia, “Clickbait” led me to “Betteridge’s law of Headlines” which led me to “Sensationalism”, while the original article also called up “Yellow Journalism” and “Media Manipulation”.

I’m going to touch on most of these, and a few things more, in the course of this article, before pulling out a silver lining or two to the whole mess.

I can’t make it worth tolerating a world inundated by Clickbait, but I can at least squeeze some value out of the reality.

Clickbait Definition

“Clickbait” is generally considered to be a website link that is designed to entice the viewer to click through to a specific link or video.

In my book, there are four major types of Clickbait:

• Clickbait that attempts to exploit the “Curiosity Gap”, providing just enough information to make the reader curious about the content being linked to;
• Clickbait that acts to reinforce or capitalize on a reader’s justifiable interest in a subject only to manipulate or apply only tangentially to that interest;
• Clickbait that attempts to enrage, indignate, outrage, or otherwise to play on the typical reader’s emotions;
• Clickbait that utilizes the advertising maxim of creating a problem which can be solved by clicking the link.

Of these, only the first is “officially” considered Clickbait, but that’s just a case of definitions lagging behind the reality; before something can be classified and categorized, it needs to be experienced and analyzed.

Sensationalist Headlines

It’s a fact of life: in order to compete, headlines have had to bend toward the sensationalist over the years. This goes all the way back to the newspaper war between William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer, in which both resorted to Yellow Journalism for wider appeal. In modern times, because of the Pulitzer Prizes, many people would expect that Pulitzer was a standard-bearer for respectable journalism, but that’s at best only half-true.

Pulitzer, in general, didn’t manufacture news, but regularly sensationalized accounts of real events in order to outsell competitors who didn’t engage in the practice. This was a hugely successful approach; the old guard could not compete with it. Pulitzer drew the line at actually fabricating stories, however.

These days, the practice of sensationalizing headlines is so ubiquitous that it is not an indicator of journalistic integrity. I consider this the most tolerable and understated form of Clickbait – an attention-getting headline that leads to an article of acceptable quality and integrity.

This is also the standard that I aspire to adhere to, as a minimum – though I often add subtitles to clarify the subjects of my articles.

Would I get as many readers if I didn’t? I suspect that I would get more visitors, but would get fewer readers – and that devaluation of search engine results might even more than “compensate”, reducing the actual number of visitors in the long run.

That, of course, is the hidden motive behind being more explicit in subject description – if I mention “Encounters” or “Plot” in those subtitles, it means that any search engine will bring up my article when someone searches for “Encounters” or “Plot”, respectively, giving the “Clickbait” part of the title the opportunity to snag a reader.

Which is entirely ethical, in my view – provided the article actually delivers on those keyword promises of relevance.

Sensationalist Content

This left him vulnerable to an upstart rival with no such scruples (Hearst). As the war between the two grew more desperate and more heated, especially after Hearst stole many of Pulitzer’s best writers and editors out from under him, the two engaged in a race for the gutter (as they perceived it), which ultimately brought Pulitzer to the point of violating his own rules – just once, in desperation, as a newsboy’s strike brought both to their knees.

Horrified – or so the legend states – by the depths to which he had sunk, Pulitzer settled for second place and returned to his own ethical standards of journalism, sponsoring journalism schools and creating the prizes that still bear his name to reward quality in Journalistic practice and literature.

Of course, in the decades to come, new publishers would discover that the lines between fact and fiction could be blurred, and that the old “gutter” had a penthouse view of the true street-scene. Supermarket Tabloids such as the National Enquirer set new “standards” for Journalism, to the point that Tabloid Journalism is sometimes considered a distinct style to Yellow Journalism, though (in reality) one is simply a more extreme form of the other.

In the 70s and 80s, the National Enquirer became infamous for headlines such as “Elvis ate my cat” (to invent one from whole cloth in the style). These were the forerunners of the most pernicious forms of Clickbait – you just have to imagine the headline as a clickable link to the story.

Of course, such headlines are also completely obvious to most people. If you click on one, you know exactly what you’re going to get – a work of journalistic fiction. Other forms of Clickbait are more pernicious.

Sensationalist Celebrity Magazines

There’s a TV program in Australia called Media Watch (while the program itself might not be available overseas, certainly the transcripts on their website will be – just click on the “official website” link at the bottom of the Wikipedia article). (This isn’t the only occasion that I’ll be citing them as a source in this article, which justifies the featured mention!)

Since April this year, one of their pet peeves has been the achievement of a new low in celebrity-focused women’s magazines – not merely inventing stories about the celebrities from whole cloth, but inventing the photographic “evidence”:

• “Photoshopping Jen and Brad”, Episode 10 – April 16, 2018;
• “Photoshopping Jen and Brad, Again”, Episode 16 – May 28, 2018, and, most recently,
• “NW – The Art Of Fabrication”, Episode 22 – July 9, 2018.

Whenever President Trump rails against “fake news”, this is the standard to which he is equating those who publish opinions contrary to his own. Astonishingly, some people seem to believe him – but then, some people considered the National Enquirer factual in the 70s and 80s, too. “Elvis ate my dog”, anyone?

Gossip For Dollars

Such magazine have always purveyed Celebrity Gossip for Dollars, but over the last decade or two, the Gossip has completely taken over the content. There was a time when teens could pick up an issue with a serious biography of a famous artist and it would be 99% factual in nature.

Not any more. Again, I think this has resulted from a need to compete for sales – this time with the supermarket tabloids. Their solution: become their enemy.

I’ve never read an article that claimed reading such trash could lower your IQ or soften your brains. Such an article would also, undoubtedly, be Clickbait. But it would have more journalistic credibility than this trash – though that’s just my opinion.

The wonder is that they aren’t sued more often. But there was a perception until mid-2017 that celebrities wouldn’t sue – and, if they did, that they wouldn’t get paid very much, at least here in Australia – because payouts were (supposedly) capped at A$250,000. Then came the lawsuit for defamation by Rebel Wilson against the publishers of Women’s Day which resulted in a record judgment of more than $4.5 million in damages (Media Watch, “Rebel gets the last laugh”, September 18, 2017). This was later reduced on appeal, but still paid far in excess of the $250,000 cap, and – it was to be hoped – put some journalistic integrity back into the magazines in question. The articles linked to above show how big a deterrence it has proven to be, in the long run. More recently, we have had Geoffrey Rush suing the Daily Telegraph for defamation, and last week, Sir Cliff Richard won a suit for invasion of privacy against the BBC.

Lawsuits are supposed to be the counterbalancing driving force to such trends – a punishment for inauthenticity. Instead, the prevailing ‘wisdom’ appears to be, “any publicity is good publicity” – and that might very well be true, from the perspective of the celebrities in question, but it ignores the greater damage being done.

This is the cause of a social attitude within western culture that not only tolerates but fosters Clickbait. And it also is the shape of journalism to come, the new standard beyond which any improvement is considered quality journalism – unless something is done. It’s a scary thought: that Donald Trump’s “Fake News” might not be wrong, just ahead of its time.

Hopefully, I’m just being alarmist. There are, in fact, a number of counter-offensives against “Fake News” currently underway. I’ll come to them a little later.

Viral Phenomena

‘Viral Phenomena’ – memes, videos, advertising campaigns, news, and gossip – refers to an object to which a pattern of behavior enabled by social technology can be employed as a description of the spread of connections to the object. In the early 2000s, “going viral” was considered the holy grail of advertising. These days, it has somewhat less cache.

“Going Viral” means that the number of people who are motivated to access the media in response to a link being shared (usually, but not necessarily, through social media) exceeds the depletion of the pool of receptive available viewers that occurs as a result of their having already viewed the media.

One person watches something, finds it interesting, intriguing, or whatever, and shares it. Because they have now watched it, this takes them out of the pool of potential viewers of the media. If the number who click through to the media as a result, or who share it if it’s included in the transmission, are more than the number who have already viewed it, the content spreads at an exponential rate. Eventually, though, it reaches the point where everyone who would share it has already seen it, and the viral retransmission process collapses.

When the phenomenon was first identified, it was a conduit to free inclusion in traditional media – your content might be aired on the evening news, for example. Some products and campaigns achieved a cross-over to a completely different group of potential re-broadcasters as a result. The term stems from the similarity to the way computer viruses spread.

In the 2010s, as the phenomenon became more clearly understood, and people grew more accustomed to the content on offer, it became harder to achieve virality; early examples drew attention just because the phenomenon was new. This also meant that the rewards of achieving virality also began to mitigate; in effect, merely going viral was no longer newsworthy, you needed content that could sustain interest as well. In addition, greater access to analytic tools meant that the actual alteration in behavior that resulted became a more important metric to advertisers and their clients.

It didn’t matter how viral your advertising was if people weren’t motivated to actually buy the product or message that you were providing, in other words, and the costs of developing a marketing campaign “to go viral” could no longer be justified unless the certainty of returns were commensurate.

“Viewers multiplied by rebroadcast rate multiplied by conversion rate and divided by the cost” defined a value to the advertiser of all the different possible marketing campaigns that could be directly compared with the alternatives, permitting an unbiased perception of the return on advertising investment.

Nevertheless, where the primary objective is simply to get eyes onto a screen looking at your content so that those who are advertising on your site are exposed to a mass audience, or where all you want to do is get noticed or get some inherently-included message out to the masses, viral marketing remains a viable strategy.

It’s fair to describe Clickbait as an attempt at achieving virality with your content. You not only want people to click on the link, you want them to rebroadcast the link to others. For a while, it seemed that people were rebroadcasting links without actually clicking on the link themselves, and you could get away with nothing more than a provocative headline or tag message; it didn’t matter what the actual content was, or if it delivered on the promises of the headline/tagline; they got you to the site, that was all they wanted to achieve.

Behavior patterns on the part of the public soon began to resist, though – content that didn’t actually deliver or that was so overwhelmed by advertising as to crash the browser (it happened a time or two!) began to decline. It’s not completely gone, but it’s a lot lower in frequency than it was.

And people who are passionate about the internet as a means of communication rejoiced, thinking that this was one battle that had been won – just as Pulitzer thought that he had “won” by driving his old-school rivals out of business or into emulating the new standards of journalism that he had created. Both had the same blind spot – the assumption that the headline would connect to accurate and valid information, regardless of the sensationalizing of the headline.

If the message to which the Clickbait links is mendacious, or distorted in perspective, but pretends to be otherwise, the Clickbait can’t be considered false advertising. And that inevitably leads to the creation of right-wing media like Breitbart and their left-wing analogues such as the Huffington Post to exploit this bypassing of the ‘credibility filter’ that people had developed.

The Social Media Echo-chamber

This provides another way of perceiving viral phenomena such as marketing: as an attempt to generate content that utilizes the social media echo-chamber to amplify the marketing effort.

I’ve written about that echo-chamber before, and don’t see any need to rehash the discussions here. Instead, let me just point you at the most relevant article: ‘The Greater Society Of Big Bad Wolves: RPG Villains of the blackest shade‘, which (in the section “The Psychological Effects of Power,” half-way down) discusses the Echo Chamber and its causes, and relating it to other psychological phenomena such as the Stanford Prison Experiment.

(Alleged) Russian Manipulations

Let me be honest – I don’t think there’s much doubt anymore that the Russian government attempted to manipulate the American political landscape in such a way that Donald Trump’s campaign would weaken the Clinton government that everyone expected to result from the 2016 US Presidential elections. But the claims and evidence still haven’t actually been tested in a court of law, so there remains the slightest sliver of hesitation.

But what did they (allegedly) do? Really? And how can it be suggested that there was no impact on the outcome?

Setting aside the hacking of the DNC’s servers and subsequent release of information damaging to the Clinton campaign, what you have essentially is a bunch of politically-charged memes and links to “news” that was distorted systematically to heighten distrust of the political center and political establishment.

Would any of these stories have changed votes? The most likely answer is “not directly”, though they created a climate in which it became possible for an outsider like Trump to steal votes from the disaffected. “Give me a lever and a place to stand and I will move the earth” wrote Archimedes – the alleged Russian meddling was the lever that enabled Trump to move the Political World four paces to the Right and several steps toward the conspiracy fringe. You know them – they’re the ones who used to believe the National Enquirer.

The Really Fake News

Whenever I hear mention of “fake news”, one of three thoughts follows it: The celebrity magazines (discussed earlier), the (alleged) Russian manipulations (described above), or – perhaps the worst of the lot – the Really Fake News.

This involves paying a broadcaster to dress up advertising as a news story and broadcast it within the news.

It started innocuously enough – a plug for sponsors during a chat show or variety show. Then came specific segments on products within such programming, but more especially as part of the breakfast shows. These evolved into infomercials, which have come to dominate late-night TV (a note to anyone involved in such “programs”: I will never, Ever, EVER buy something (or even express interest in it) without being told the price).

Then we got whole shows that are 50% or more sponsor messages, like “Studio 10”, which identifies itself as a Talk Show but which spends most of its time with the hosts talking to sponsors about their products. But they don’t deceive – they provide prices for the products, and viewers at least know what they are in for when they tune in. These are – essentially – the old variety shows without the variety.

But things have taken an altogether more serious and deceptive route in the last year or so. Once again, Media Watch was on the job:

• “Junketing journalists”, Media Watch, 23 October 2017, in which Australia’s national Airline, Qantas, got a week of free media by flying 30 journalists to Seattle to cover the opening of a new air route between the US and Australia. Most organizations disclosed the relationship between the story and the airline, but Channels 7 and 9 got a rap over the knuckles for failing to do so. Similar stories surrounded the Winter Olympics in Socchi.
• “Spot the sponsored content”, Media Watch, 25 September 2017, which takes a general overview of the situation as it applies to various Media organizations;
• “Nine News for sale”, Media Watch, February 5, 2018, which reveals that the network had run “sponsored content for a major advertiser in [it’s] afternoon bulletins” in late January;
• “More ads masquerading as news”, Media Watch, March 5, 2018, this time, on Network 10’s “Studio 10”, and pushing the health claims of a sponsoring product;
• “Prime Time PR puff”, Media Watch, 24 April 2017, in which an hour-long advertisement on a commercial network paid for and editorially-controlled by the advertiser, was broadcast as a News Special.

These stories are becoming “the new normal”, according to important industry figures, due to the declining viewership of non-internet, paid, delivery-on-demand services. The newspapers have been facing a similar decline for a decade, and the term on the lips of every organization hoping to survive is “integrated platform”. Cost-cutting has led to content being taken directly from outside sources like Reddit with little-or-no fact-checking effort (Media Watch, May 1, 2017). Sponsor influence has also blatantly invaded the editorial controls of the main news bulletins. It is reaching the point where it can be hard to distinguish between advertorials and news bulletins, and the former are disguised to look like the latter.

There had been the occasional bungle in advertising, but nothing like this. We were used to stories like Nine’s Today show launching a health crusade against sugar while spruiking sponsor’s sugary snack foods (Media Watch, 11 June 2018) – all the network’s morning shows had made the occasional gaff such as this in the past. It happens. But such segments actually reinforced the separation between actual content and sponsored “content”, so they were tolerable – you could tell which parts to listen to, and which to ignore.

Anything that erodes the confidence that the viewer can have in their news sources opens the door to partisan extremism, exactly the same as that allegedly perpetrated on the US by the Russians.

Weakening controls over commercial behavior and waning standards in a desperate economic climate for the traditional media are to blame. But the cause doesn’t matter; it’s the end result that is significant.

I have absolutely no reason not to believe that the same forces are extant in the US, and the UK, and Japan, and Germany… the Russians may have accelerated an already-present trend, and nothing more. The concern is that focusing on preventing future interference may be deemed sufficient to counter the consequences, leaving nothing to stop the underlying social trend.

Of course, it’s the Reddit connection that brings this discussion back to Clickbait. This is clearly the Clickbait phenomenon feeding back into the mainstream media, and eroding its credibility.

Propaganda Pamphlets

Here’s another way to look at what Russia supposedly did in 2016: think of it as the internet equivalent of paying people to stand on street corners and hand out propaganda pamphlets that look like they were locally printed.

The difference is that most people are inherently suspicious of pamphlets, suspecting that they might be propaganda; they seem to have no such filter when it comes to the internet. “You can’t believe everything you read on the net” is advice that everyone should know by now and take to heart, but it seems that we all have multiple blind spots in that protection, perhaps because all content looks alike.

It’s not like a newspaper, where page count and page size make an obvious difference – the day an alt-whatever news pamphlet gets to the same dimensions as the New York Times or USA Today is the day it can be taken to have achieved the same standards of face-value credibility. But on the internet, you only ever see one page of the whole at a time, and money spent dressing up one page applies to all the other pages automatically.

Scams & Phishing

There have been a couple of nasty scams floating around Australia over the last year or so. Nasty because they take advantage of people, or because they are more credible (and hence dangerous) than those that have been seen before.

One of them targets Chinese immigrants, claiming that there has been a problem with their visa and that unless they stump up A$$$$ for a quick processing fee, they will face deportation within the week.

Another has fooled people into thinking they’ve been called up for Jury Duty and have to log onto a website (link provided) and provide all sorts of personal details for verification – in reality, it’s a Phishing trap.

And the number of phone calls I’ve received from those allegedly representing insurance companies, or lawyers interested in suing same, stating that “someone there had a car accident not too long ago” would be enough to make me a wealthy man at a relatively low price per call.

These are, to my way of thinking, “Binary Content”, i.e. content in two parts – one used to enhance the credibility and clickability of the enclosed Clickbait link, and the payload at the other end of the link. And, like more traditional forms of Clickbait, they erode trust in the mechanisms and infrastructure of society.

Weasel Advertising

Another pet peeve of mine is at least somewhat relevant to all this – weasel advertising. “Studies have shown that Dried Tomato Tendrills may be effective at fighting brain-sucking leeches from Venus”, or some other medical condition. My automatic assumption on encountering such advertising is to (forcefully) respond, “…but it probably won’t be!”

After all, if they had the real science to back up their claims, they would gleefully cite the paper and would say something like “…is effective in 65% of cases at….” or 75%, or 90%, or whatever. Quote some specific, verifiable numbers and you automatically get my attention.

To my mind, this is all medical Clickbait targeting those who suffer from the conditions cited as being benefited by the substance. And there’s little more capable of inducing anger in me than taking advantage of the unwell (Okay, there are one or two things).

The Cynic Bites Back

That’s probably the ultimate defense against all of these threats; cynicism. If I read something online, or hear something on the TV, or get told something, I automatically reject it (no matter how much it accords with my personal beliefs) until I can get some third-party independent verification. And fourth-party.

It might be that the item cites facts that I have already verified, putting it into the credible-but-unproven category. Over time, patterns build up, lending some sources greater credibility than others. And, of course, some sources have prior reputations that suggestive – though I always remember that all institutions evolve over time. There was, for example, a time when Yahoo was a strongly-trusted news source; but these days, it’s necessary to take every story with a grain of salt and a search for “spin” or commercial relationships.

Equally, some sources establish reputations for being poor with the truth. I wouldn’t trust some people to tell me a line was straight, or how to spell “dog”. That doesn’t preclude them being right every now and then – but it does mean they have to earn that credibility.

Clickbait Recognition

In preparation for this article, I wanted to get a feel for how people treated Clickbait, and in particular, how effectively the recognized it when they saw it.

Clickbait comes in many forms; some is deliberately obtuse, or appeals to emotions, is controversial, or intentionally omits facts and information, or is excessively loud and self-centered, designed to elicit a reaction. Studies have shown that anger and outrage are more effective motivators toward action such as clicking and/or sharing links, so I’m especially wary if either of those responses are elicited.

I’m also aware of the list of “what makes things go viral”, according to the book “Contagious: Why Things Catch On” by Jonah Berger:

• Social Currency – the better something makes people look, the more likely they will be to share it
• Triggers – things that are top of mind are more likely to be tip of tongue
• Emotion – when we care, we share
• Public – the easier something is to see, the more likely people are to imitate it
• Practical Value – people share useful information that seems helpful either to them or to someone they know
• Stories – Trojan Horse stories carry messages and ideas along for the ride

To this well-recognized list, I add four more:

• Shock – if something seems unexpected or surprising, it is more likely to be shared;
• Outrage – if something seems outrageous, we are more likely to share our indignation (with link to justify it)
• Agreement – if we agree with a sentiment or reaction, we are more likely to perpetuate that sentiment or reaction by sharing it.
• Niche Targeting – if something appears relevant to a niche interest that the reader shares, it is adjudged to be potentially interesting to the readers contacts, and hence is more likely to be shared.

To examine the question, I performed a completely unscientific survey over Friday and Saturday. No-one admitted to not knowing what Clickbait was, or to always clicking on it when they encountered it and recognized it for what it was. Responses were equally divided between those who claim to never knowingly click on Clickbait, and those who can sometimes be enticed to click, even knowing what it was.

And that’s the power of Clickbait – it makes us contemplate clicking even when we know better.

Adventure Titles Should Be Like Clickbait

Which brings me to that silver lining. Back when I was working on my original “A Good Name Is Hard To Find” series, aside from some very general advice –

Double or even triple meanings, exaggerations, heightened drama, metaphors and use of nouns, taking synopsis phrases out of context, and so on, are all valid tools to be used.

– the best I could do was offer technique demonstration by extension – giving the names of adventures from my campaigns, how they related to the adventure content, and the occasional bit of relevant commentary.

I was clearer when it came to describing the advantages offered by a good adventure title –

Used correctly, they can put players into the correct frame of mind to react in the right way to the events in a scenario, conceal the identity of a villain until or hide a plot twist until the big reveal, heighten the drama of a situation and/or raise the expectations of the players. At the very least, they provide a referent ‘index’ to the events that occur in the course of the adventure. They can also add to the flavor of the campaign, reinforcing genre elements.

Yes, this is definitely metagaming – nothing wrong with that. It’s using the players to get to the PCs.

I was able to offer some more constructive advice on naming styles in Part 2 of the series on Adventure names (which is why I’ve linked to it). But I’ve never been 100% satisfied with the advice that I was able to offer on the subject, given the importance that I attach to it.

And that brings me back to Clickbait.

When you’re delivering an adventure title to your players, you are employing Niche Targeting. That makes them more likely to “buy in” to the adventure; it helps get them into the right head-space. Every other Clickbait trick is available to you in order to selectively target a particular frame of mind or response. Decide how you want the adventure title to color perceptions of the adventure and shape the thinking of the players, and you’re half-way to deciding what the title should be.

In particular, and in addition to all the advice and technique described above, I have three specific pieces of advice to offer.

Method 1: The Tease

Method 1 is to tease the players with adventure content. Each session’s play should overtly bring that tease closer to fulfillment without actually quite getting there until the crescendo of the adventure, and even then it might not be quite the big deal that you made it look; you can use the tease to play into player expectations and then throw in a plot twist that completely blindsides them. Again, it’s all about the state of mind that you want to achieve.

Method 2: The Strip-show

Method 2 I call the strip-show. Instead of teasing the players with promises of adventure content, you tease them to arouse their character’s prurient interests in some fashion. Let’s say that you have an arch-villain, Count Zalnych, who’s been a thorn in the players sides on more than one occasion. An adventure title like “The undoing of Count Zalnych” would be of obvious interest! It’s just as important to actually and positively deliver on the promises made by your title, but – as usual – double meanings, metaphors, and the like can all make the promise something other than it appears to be at face value.

Above and beyond that, this method can harness the power of innuendo, rumor, and misleading claim.

Method 3: Engaging The Cynic

Method 3 acts in complete opposition to the other two. Your title alleges something shocking or anger-rousing, but then subverts the promise of that content with a question mark. To continue the example given above, “The Ultimate Victory Of Count Zalnych?” as much as dares the players (and hence the PCs) to ensure that the adventure doesn’t deliver.

Studying Clickbait links, whenever you find them, and working out how they are supposed to motivate you to act, helps you learn to create good titles.

And it doesn’t matter if the players recognize that your adventure title is baiting them and refuse to take that bait; simply be engaging with the title enough to recognize it as Clickbait, they buy into it enough to be that little bit more receptive to your adventure content.

Side-benefits

And, of course, you will also learn to better recognize Clickbait and the ways that it can be used to manipulate you – a couple of pronounced side-benefits. The expansion of the Clickbait repertoire to include phishing techniques is a further refinement to this. The skill only has to save you from one Nigerian Prince to amply repay the effort involved!

A limited window – I hope

It must be said that, with any luck, you will only have a limited time to master these techniques. The window is already closing.

Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter have already tweaked their operations to constrict Clickbait and false advertising. Fact-checking sites, which were on the way out, have suddenly made a big comeback. Lawsuits appear to be on the increase, and the plaintiffs are winning. Australia has Media Watch, and if you don’t have something similar already, now is as good a time as any to agitate for a local equivalent. Users of social media are slowly becoming more aware of Clickbait and more discerning about the choice to engage it. All this should mean that Clickbait is on the decline. It is increasingly hard to study something that can no longer be found. So take advantage of the opportunity while you can – and then you will be better-equipped to join the fight against the more seditious variants And that can benefit all of us!