Seeing through clickbait news - BBC example - ambiguity in title can give a false impression to naive readers that UK could be attacked by Iran - and tips to see less clickbait and sensationalism
We get two things here, clickbait and senationalist stories.
Clickbait stories. The title is false, the story is true. Many people only read the title and never read the story. That includes those who share stories on social media without reading them or who are in a panic and are scared to read it, or people who are autistic and may find it far easier to parse a title than the story itself.
Sensationalist stories. Both the title AND the story are FALSE.
I don’t recommend scared people to search for this phrase. But if you search for the term “World War III” then as of writing this, on most days ALL the stories in the first page of search results are either clickbait or sensationalist.
Even the best mainstream media such as the BBC often does clickbait stories. I don’t mean to criticise the BBC especially. All the mainstream news do this but the BBC is especially impactful on the scared people I help from the UK, because it is respected by many. So here is an example, and I’ll talk through what this title can look like to a scared person.
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TEXT ON GRAPHIC: Text added to help scared people
CLICKBAIT - TITLE FALSE - often due to double meanings
Title: Why war in Middle East involves UK more than you might think
Correction: Israel's battles NEVER involved the UK except to shoot down drones headed for Israel.
"What happens in the Middle East never stays in the Middle East."
Correction: ALL wars in the Middle East STAY IN THE MIDDLE EAST
broader effects only economics and political.
Really about:
- oil prices
- evacuating Brits
- defending Israel from drones and cruise missiles
- that UK will never attack Iran
Annotations of the BBC article:
. Why war in Middle East involves UK, BBC's Laura Kuenssberg writes
For people worried about a world war this title suggests that there is a risk of the UK attacked by bombs from the Middle East.
The title doesn’t say that but it vaguely hints at it for scared people as that is what they will interpret “war in Middle East involves UK” as about.
But if you click through and read the article it’s about
evacuating Brits from Lebanon
the impact on costs of oil if Israel hits Iran's oil terminals
the UK shooting down Iranian drones and cruise missiles headed for Israel in April and it was ready to do it again but coudn’t do anything as Iran only fired ballistic missiles this time which fly through outer space to reach Israel
That UK will never attack Iran.
We have had numerous wars in the Middle East: the Iraq war, the war against Iraq in Kuwait (gulf wars), war in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria.
Nobody in the Middle East ever tries to fight the US or UK on our own home countries and nobody there ever could. They couldn’t even get to the US or UK to fight them.
Also, Russia is NOT going to fight the US or Israel and China’s only real interest is in oil exports from the Middle East. So the idea of a world war starting in the Middle East is preposterous.
WW3 in Middle East - Nobody in the area has ICBMs or nukes except Israel. Russia and China do not support Hamas BULLS**T
For more on this, see my blog post.
BLOG: WW3 in Middle East? BULLS**T
On this topic of world war see my:
This blog post was originally part of that draft but I’ve split it out as a separate section and shortened it slightly in the original post.
Why do titles of so many articles hint at false things - because title authors optimize to get as many people to click through as possible - may not even know why it gets more clicks
So why do journalists and mainstream news do this, why do the titles of so many articles say such false things to us like this?
It’s best not to call them lies because as we’ll see the author of the title (who is often different from the author of the article) may not necessarily know about how we read it. Their attention is on clicks not on the meaning of the title.
It is just to get clicks on the title. They do it automatically.
First you do need a good title to interest a reader in your article.
It is a golden rule of journalism, taught to any news reporter at the beginning of their career - your introduction should grab the reader straight away.
If you cannot hold someone's attention for a sentence, you have no hope of getting them to read the rest of your article.
The same is true for headlines; stark, witty or intriguing ones can draw the reader's eye to a story.
That so far is fine. Nobody has any objections to that, it leads to clearer more concise writing.
But then clickbait is when you focus so much on optimizing the title that it becomes misleading and doesn’t match the story.
Headline writing has long been considered a skill but, in the digital age, a new word has become synonymous with online journalism - clickbait.
Put simply, it is a headline which tempts the reader to click on the link to the story. But the name is used pejoratively to describe headlines which are sensationalised, turn out to be adverts or are simply misleading.
Publishers increasingly use it for simple economics; the more clicks you get, the more people on your site, the more you can charge for advertising.
So, they are not trying to scare people. They have figures for how many people clicked on each title in the news for that day.
They want to increase those numbers so they try different titles. This can be for ad revenue - often companies will pay by the number of views of their ad on the page. But even news sites that don’t depend on ads still want to attract people to their site, so the BBC and others that are NOT ad supported also use click bait.
Suppose for instance the title was:
“UK evacuates Brits from Lebanon during bombings”
Well that wouldn’t get that much interest.
Suppose that title is running at 1 click every 10 minutes and it is on page 2 of Google News.
Now someone changes the title to
“Why war in Middle East involves UK, BBC's Laura Kuenssberg writes”
And they add the bits about oil prices and UK ready to shoot down cruise / drone missiles
Now perhaps it changes to 10 clicks per minute, and perhaps it gets into the first few results on page 1 in search results.
Well then they will stick with this new title.
They don’t necessarily even know why people preferred that title. And they likely don't stop and think much about what the title actually means. They may not even know that scared people clicked on it because they saw “involves the UK” as FALSELY hinting at the UK entering a world war.
It is easily possible that such a change that FALSELY hints at a world war until you click through could achieve a 10-fold or even 100-fold increase in clicks.
So they look at those figures and say "Look this title worked well" and so they do more titles like that.
That basically is how it happens.
The preinstalled browser on Windows shows click bait and sensationalist news every time you go to a new tab
We are exposed to so much news today. As an example, on Windows laptops the preinstalled Microsoft browser (Microsoft Edge) shows a news page when you start up the browser and also every time you go to a new tab.
This page is usually full of clickbait headlines. But it doesn’t just have clickbait titles, often its sensationalist with seriously misleading articles too.
Some of the UK sensationalist press such as the red top tabloids FALSELY claim alien invasions, colliding asteroids, and world war 3 most weeks - they are like the US supermarket tabloids mixed up with serious news.
This is a typical sensationalist Daily Express story
See:
BLOG: About the Daily Express
So - not just click bait titles, often its sensationalist with seriously misleading articles too.
The Microsoft Start Page often has stories from the Daily Express and other red top tabloids with nothing on the page to indicate that they are red top tabloids or what a red top tabloid is for those who aren’t familiar with them.
Some of these red top tabloids FALSELY claim alien invasions, colliding asteroids, and World War 3 several times a week - they are like the US supermarket tabloids except that they mix up the sensationalistm with serious news.
For UK users, which is where I’m writing this from, it almost never has stories from the BBC which is one of the most respected news sites in the UK.
I think perhaps American companies running search engines don’t quite realize what type of paper a red top tabloid is? How can a paper that runs this sort of thing end up in Google News or Microsoft Start? At least they should label them as “red top tabloid” or something so you know but they don’t and you can’t even remove them from the search results.
Also many people don’t know how to switch this behaviour off. They don’t want to check the news every time they go to a new tab but don’t realize this is an optional feature of the browser.
How to switch this sensationalist news filling behaviour off in Windows laptops - easy to do but it’s tucked away in an unintuitive check box
It is easy to switch off, and if you are one of those affected, this simple tip can hugely reduce your exposure to CLICKBAIT FALSE HEADLINES every day.
What you do is go to a new tab and:
click on the cog settings icon.
scroll down to switch called "Show feed"
(an unintuitive label as it doesn’t mention the word “news”)switch it to "off".
Immediately you will see a new tab page much like most other browsers without any news stories on it.
Here is how to switch off the news feed on Edge on Windows PCs / laptops. You have to scroll down past other settings to see this check box:
TEXT ON GRAPHIC: How to switch off the Microsoft Start news feed on every new tab on a Windows computer
Go to cog (settings) then scroll down to “Show feed” and switch to off.
Sadly, many users of a Windows computer won’t know how to switch it off. Every time they go to a new tab then they see the news yet again. They don’t want to see this but the option to switch it off is in an unintuitive place, amongst other check boxes part way down the page and not very clearly labelled.
If you do this, this has the potential to hugely reduce your exposure to news every day for some people :).
So anyway - at least you can switch them off.
Why do we see so much clickbait today? perhaps because people find titles individually online instead of buying a paper based on the front page as in the past
Back when the papers were printed, all that mattered were the titles on the front page of the paper.
Before you bought the paper, most would read the title - and then if interested, the front page typicallly had a paragraph or two below the title then said something like “continues on page 3”. You would then buy the paper to read the rest of the story.
This is what you might see on the stand - you’d see the part above the fold, then you’d take it from the stand and unfold it and if you still like what you buy you’d buy it and read the rest of the story inside.
This is an example, I think it’s okay to reproduce this under fair use since it’s not going to take any sales away from NY Times to “break” this story now :). Just to illustrate a typical front page layout
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. ''The New York Times'' Announces Historic ''Men Walk On Moon'' -- 21 July 1969
The title has to match the first paragraph or two, or you won’t buy it. The titles of stories inside the paper only need to attract your attention enough to pick out the story on the page.
Also the authors of the titles only got feedback every day from the number of papers they sold that day with one or another title.
Now they get constant feedback for every title of every article of which titles get most clicks.
The title in Google news only has a snippet from the page below it and often the snippet is selected to match the title and is itself misleading.
So there is much more optimizing for clicks, and so more click bait.
What's more, they see effects immediately in real time. They can continue to tweak the titles and may try many titles often AFTER the article is posted. You often go back to a page and see they changed the title. There was no way to do that with printed papers and it was far too expensive to try different runs of the paper with different titles to see how they sold.
If the story is on a high profile site like the BBC or New York Times, Associated Press etc that Google’s bot scrapes frequently, they will see the change almost instantly if they get a very click bait title that lots of people click on.
So they have
instant feedback
try many more variations
can monitor attention for each title separately
if ad supported they get more revenue for the articles with more clicks
So there is a financial motive for clickbait for each title, and almost instant feedback.
This is not necessarily bad. I used to write blog posts for my Science 2.0 blog and if I changed the title of an article to make it more clear and succint I’d quickly see an increase in clicks - and it would go to the top of the front page of Google News for relevant searches. So it can help you to write better.
But it can motivate people to write misleading titles if they are not also very careful to make sure the title matches the content.
What you can do about it
The main thing is to reduce your exposure to it. You can try checking the news less often also.
Most people find it much easier to positively focus on things than to try to stop thinking about things. So, instead of trying to stop yourself checking the news many times a day - to find other things that interest you online or in real life.
Also doing things to help keep healthy in body and mind and to find worthwhile or engaging or fun or enjoyable etc things to do. Not as a distraction but as your focus, doing them because you want to do them.
See also my:
BLOG: Seven tips for dealing with doomsday fears
If you are bothered by what the social media algorithms show you, see my:
BLOG: How to train your social media algorithm dragon to fetch whatever you want online
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