The internet makes one long for the simpler days of manipulative T.V. commercials.  Internet clickbait makes old school yellow journalism look high-minded and objective prose.  Some would define clickbait as simply a hyperbolic headline that exceeds the weight of the actual content of the story.  

At the beginning of the Covid -19 crisis, I recall seeing a headline that a 29-year-old soccer coach in Spain had died from Covid-19.  The headline featured a photo of a strong, robust young man.  The upshot was the casual reader scrolling by would believe, to their horror, the virile young man in the photograph had succumbed to Covid-19.  As it turned out, the unfortunate young man probably looked nothing like the photograph at the time of his death because he had terminal leukemia before contracting Covid.  The hyperbole of the headline does not begin to capture what is so insidious about the dark art of clickbait.  The goal of advertisers is to get your attention by upsetting you.  In the example above, the site got attention, and clicks, alarming people that this healthy-looking 29-year old died from this new and scary virus.  Well, that’s not what happened at all, but haha, made you look.  

This shameless manipulation of our most primal emotions keeps us angrier and more scared than we need to be or should be just to sell us crap we don’t need.  Worse yet, these charlatans are manufacturing a schism in the public for the sake of crass marketing.

In the video below, the author examines how outrage porn is used to get free marketing for otherwise unremarkable, or even bad, movies.  Even the slightest breach of identity politics orthodoxy sets the Twitterverse ablaze with recriminations and garments being torn rent in despair at the insult.  Et voila, a forgettable movie is now on the tip of everyone’s tongue, for free.