What’s Wrong with Sensationalist News?
You’ve definitely seen clickbait headlines if you’re ever on social media. It’s because of our natural tendency to gravitate towards new and novel things. This makes social media algorithms favour extreme news pieces.
Photo by Connor Danylenko from Pexels
Inspiration:
I was on Facebook for less than 30 minutes the other day. On the homepage and videos feed, the first thing that popped up was bad driving by truck drivers and motorists in the US and another video of tourist scams in the US and Europe.
These videos invoke extreme and negative feelings. Social media has gravitated towards the extreme ends of content, whether that’s positive or negative. The kind of content that keeps your attention for longer, the kind of content that can grab your attention in the first place.
Pay attention to what you pay attention to
“Think good, and good follows. Think evil, and evil follows. You are what you think all day long”
Are these the videos the type of content you want to pay attention to? How does it realistically affect you? Or more specifically, is it within your sphere or circle of influence? If not, I’m trying to consciously make a choice to avoid content that fall outside of my circle of influence. I don’t even drive, but why do I see so many videos of motorists on my timeline on Facebook?
More examples of pieces that have invoked a response from me, the increase in COVID cases back home in Brunei, literally a 20-hour flight away. Or hearing that the turtles in Indonesia are getting out of extinction level threat. Unfortunately, neither of these things are within my circle of influence but can induce very extreme feelings still.
Cutting these out might be beneficial to you if you get easily affected by external news. I personally feel like being more proactive in choosing what we consume is better than letting the platforms choose what we see and what we get fed. The Social Dilemma has shown that even your thoughts can be shaped by social media. What you see or more accurately, what you believe in, the platforms will provide on a more extreme scale.
Even two weeks ago, the first thing I see my YouTube home recommendations is a video on an unfortunate shooting event in the UK. Every social media platform, has favoured these clickbait-y and eye-catching articles.
These sensationalist things that you see might give you some sort of feeling whether it be negative or positive but from personal experience, most articles, posts or videos are negative. This means that you’re left worrying, anxious and maybe even depressed over something you can’t control. This goes back to my personal focus on working within your Sphere of Influence and this definitely is one of the biggest problems with social media.
Your curiosity gap
These platforms make use of the curiosity gap. We are curious and inquisitive creatures and the algorithms themselves have figured that out, by giving us what we crave. Veritasium on YouTube had a great explanation on the curiosity gap and click-baiting.
“They give you enough information to make you curious, but not enough to satisfy that curiosity”
That is a very good way to explain why clickbait works. Derek from Veritasium further broke down the types of clickbait we see:
Legit-Bait
Clickbait
Legitbait actually provides what the title and/or thumbnail promised. Where clickbait pulls you along for the ride and leaves you hanging.
What should you take from this?
If anything, I want you to understand the things presented to us on social media platforms. How they’re geared to make us stay there. The company’s biggest aim is to keep us loyal customers and visitors of their websites and that’s their bottom line.
If that is a realisation, everything else comes into place. Their desire to show us clickbait to keep us on the website and even incentivising content creators to create clickbait-type of work.