You’ve spent months seeing your social media news feeds like Facebook and Twitter littered with headlines stating:” you won’t believe what happens next”, enticing you to CLICK HERE by showing a sensational picture, title, or video clip and promising an almost unbelievable story only to finally realize that the link did not provide you with any information you were expecting and that after many clicks into an unknown website you had either given up your personal information, downloading malware or installed a virus on your computer. Clickbait is the name given to this type of scam and it has many people falling victim to these scammers.
Clickbate or linkbate is a term used to describe a type of hyperlink on a web page, which is now commonly found within social media news feeds that entices a visitor to click to continue reading an article. Typically clickbait links will forward the user to a page that requires registration or payment to further read the enticing article, or is one in a series of pages to help drive page views for a website which ultimately makes them more money. Most often than not, clickbait type links have catchy or provocative headlines that are difficult for most users to resist and often have little or nothing to do with the actual web page.
Here is a good example: just after the death of Robin Williams, many clickbait headlines began showing up in social media news feeds claiming that if you click on their headline link you will have an opportunity to see a final goodbye video he made just before he died. All false as we now know, but highly attractive to many at the time exploiting a ‘curiosity gap’ by providing just enough information to make the reader curious, but not enough to satisfy their curiosity without clicking through to the linked content.
Facebook in particular, since it seems to have one of the largest amount of “click-bait” content and up until a while ago, their algorithm currently rewarded these links when they’re posted throughout their site because the links tended to get a lot of clicks. By now though, I think people are catching on and complaining that stories with clickbait headlines can drown out content from friends and pages that people really care about, making Facebook less useful .
Therefore, Facebook said that they are going to tweak their news feed algorithm and instead of measuring the amount of clicks an ad or news item gets to determine how often users see it, they will measure the amount of time a user spends on a story after clicking on it and prioritize posts that attract the most reader attention.Not only is the switch good for readers, it’s good for publishers who want to produce more substantial reporting and analysis, and who will now feel less pressure to write quick, disposable content that loses its flavor faster that a piece of Bazooka gum. It’s also refreshing to see Facebook put its money where it’s mouth is — if it’s going to attack news organizations for failing journalism, it should at least try to be part of the solution.
Here are some tips for avoiding clickbait scams:
First thing to do is Don’t Click! – Users should stay away from posts containing “exclusive,” “shocking” or “sensational” content. If it sounds too bizarre to be true, it’s probably clickbait.
Hover & Hesitate! – Before clicking on the post, users should hover their cursor over the link to see where clicking will actually lead them. Don’t click on links that lead to unfamiliar websites.
Be Aware of Hacker Hostages! – While users may share similar interests with their online friends, they shouldn’t put complete trust in their online content as it may not actually be their friends liking and sharing the posts. It is possible that your friend’s social media account was compromised by a hacker.
TED.com, a very popular non-profit company, devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks (usually 18 minutes or less), covering any and all topics has a really interesting talk on clickbait. You can watch it at: http://tiny.cc/clickbait
