Truth and Technology

Andrew Selhorst
as330215@ohio.edu

One important thing to consider when publishing news is the truth that the title holds to viewers or readers. In recent years, something that has been growing in popularity is the concept of "clickbait." Clickbait is a form of false advertising that draws the attention of viewers to your article or video, something that baits clicks. For example, videos on YouTube may either leave out or exaggerate details of the video in order to draw more attention to the video. This is a way to make a story or video seem more interesting than it may actually be. Clickbaiting is something that has grown in popularity and has become something that is almost unbelievable. In fact, it has become such a big thing that it is recognized as an official word in Merriam-Webster dictionary, defined as "something (such as a headline) designed to make readers want to click on a hyperlink especially when the link leads to content of dubious value or interest."

 Clickbaiting has grown from making headlines more enticing to viewers, into simply lying to them instead. This article from the Columbia Journalism Review calls this "trolling your readers." This article discusses how websites will use headlines that barely even relate to the story behind the link at all. The reason behind this is that those who share these articles on Facebook or Twitter or whatever other social media platforms they use rarely even read the actual article that they are sharing. They see the headline and share it without ever bothering to learn more about the "news." The article states that the sites that use this tactic do not really care whether their links are being shared in a positive or negative manner, so long as they are continuing to get interactions. This is similar to the thought process in marketing of "any publicity is good publicity."

This idea of truth in titles and whether or not the content of your article matches what your headline says relates back to something that we have talked about in class and wrote about in blogs so many times this semester: telling the whole truth. We as journalists have the moral responsibility of being entirely truthful to our audience. Being entirely truthful means telling a story for exactly what it is - no leaving out details, no exaggerating details, no changing parts of the story to fit any certain ideologies. And if we are using clickbait, or trolling our readers as Columbia Journalism Review would call it, are we being entirely truthful with our audience? We must keep in mind that we need to make ethical decisions, regardless of whether or not an unethical decision will provide us with any kind of personal gain. Even if using clickbait titles gives us more impressions online, is it worth it to make that kind of unethical decision? We could be risking our reputation, we could be risking losing our existing audience, and it goes against what we agree to as journalists when we accept our moral responsibilities.