Clickbait

Clickbait Defined

Clickbait, at its simplest, is a trail that is meant to be followed. Many definitions also suggest that the bait promises higher quality than the content delivers or takes the reader to appealing content unrelated to the context in which the link appears: the topic-adjacent stories about movies or food that might appear on a news website when a winter storm is expected. As a marketing/advertising tactic, clickbait capitalizes on the narrative gap created between an enticing headline and an unknown text. Information is rationed out to bring the audience along, often following techniques familiar in U.S. news practice from the mid-20th century: the use of nonspecified pronouns (He thought A, but B), posing questions that are answered in the text (Does A support B?), or ending a headline after a subordinate clause (But when they …). Thus, some scholarly definitions restrict click baiting to cases in which a headline or link depends semantically on information from the main text to be understood. Other approaches associate clickbait with the related [Page 338]practice of aggregation or to an emphasis on “soft news” or feature topics, though click baiting is frequent in hard news as well.

Many features of clickbait are familiar because the challenge of abstraction—the need to reduce an event in size while fitting it into a narrative structure—has long been familiar to journalism. The 2-hour meeting or sporting contest produces a sequential flow of events that must be organized, reduced, and shaped into a coherent whole, then summarized in even fewer words as a headline. Qualifications and hedges, essential in the course of the event itself, are discarded as the sequence becomes a narrative. This corner-cutting might yield a story that is tauter than an earlier text—panicked shots fired by a frightened woman at her attacker become “neatly aimed bullets” by the trial—or a headline that is brighter than the story, without presumptively counting as fakery; absent the ability to prove a negative or see the future, the event might indeed have been as exciting as promised. One form of this practice is known as hedge deletion: assertions become more authoritative by shedding qualifiers such as “expected to” or “as many as,” and this loss is more common as they move farther from the event in time and distance. Rearranging evidence for storytelling purposes is also not novel; it can be dated to the early days of news photography in the 19th century and continued into the new century with innovations such as the composograph, which combined actual images into real or fanciful scenes (recently deceased celebrities being greeted in heaven, for example).

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