Left-leaning think tank The Fabian Society has published a series of essays and proposals about the future of media.
The authors’ proposals include: a tightening of competition law to stop publishers acquiring an “excessive” market share, reviving Cairncross Review plans to provide public funding for smaller news outlets, and consulting on incentivised or compulsory mechanisms of alternative disputation resolution for defamation cases “to end the threat of excessive costs” which trigger a chilling effect on journalism.
Other recommendations relate to the press regulation system, Ofcom’s powers to regulate under the Online Safety Act, and reviving the second part of the Leveson Inquiry.
Here, journalist Mandy Gardner assesses the incentives behind the increasing prevalence of clickbait – and documents its effects on victims of press abuse and its distortion of our media landscape.
According to Ofcom, seven in ten UK adults consume online news in some capacity, with more than half using social media as a news source. These figures are significantly higher for younger readers; 90% of 16 to 24-year-olds use online sources for news, and eight in ten use social media.
On social media, headlines are all-important, and clickbait has become a common strategy used to increase engagement and reach on social media platforms by capturing people’s attention in the fast-paced, overcrowded online environment. Clickbait lures readers in through various psychological tactics, including emotional appeals and ‘fear of missing out’.
Of course, sensationalist, overhyped headlines are nothing new. They have long been used, particularly by the tabloids, to grab people’s attention and make them more likely to buy a newspaper.
What is different now is that, due to the way content algorithms work and a lack of social media regulation, clickbait has become a self-perpetuating cycle which feeds ever more sensationalist – and often untrue – content, which can drown out genuine news.
The effectiveness of clickbait-style posts is also affecting the kind of stories news sites and newspapers write – more simplistic, emotive news is the order of the day. To make matters worse, most newspapers and their websites are – if they are regulated at all – members of the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO), a complaints outfit set up by the industry that has shown itself unable or unwilling to enforce high standards.
This exacerbates the problems with clickbait journalism, as it means there is little incentive for newspapers to get their stories right or conduct ethical newsgathering. That means more stories about murder, celebrities and controversy.
In many cases, it seems that the more awful the story, the better for clicks. But what is the impact of clickbait on those who are the subject of news – for instance, the families of people who have been murdered or killed? I have spoken to several, and a number mentioned distressing interactions with the media.
It is also something I have personal experience of. The Daily Mail posted the CCTV footage of my daughter crossing the road before she got hit by the speeding car that killed her. The CCTV loaded automatically if you clicked on the headline on a mobile phone. The headline read: “EXCLUSIVE: Shocking moment young woman is killed by speeding hit-and-run driver escaping police – as she is flung 20 feet into the air and lands in front of horrified onlookers at London bus stop.”
I put in a complaint to IPSO after my brother alerted me. As a journalist, I knew it was pure clickbait. Worse: it was gratuitous voyeurism, and a clear intrusion into grief. I was horrified that my children could have seen it and remembered that as their last image of their sister. After six months of emails between the Daily Mail and me, mediated by IPSO, IPSO ruled in favour of the Mail. It was not an intrusion into grief, apparently.
I mentioned to IPSO throughout that my concern was that there was no journalistic justification for publishing the footage. The reason for doing so, and with the voyeuristic headline they used, was simply to get clicks. IPSO did not in any way engage with that argument, but simply issued a pro-forma response about ‘sensitivity’ of editing (they had cut out the part after the impact and focused on ‘her last moments’) and the grainy nature of the footage (if it was so grainy, what was the purpose of posting it in the first place, given their argument was that it was to trigger witnesses’ memories?). None of it held water.
The National Union of Journalists (NUJ) has acknowledged the fall in the quality of journalism which has resulted from the move to an online model. The decline, it says, has been caused by job cuts owing to the loss of revenue from newspaper sales and online advertising revenue to Google and Facebook. It has called for greater transparency from the tech giants. It has also expressed fears that AI will make the threat to jobs and quality worse. Far from standards improving since the Leveson inquiry, as some politicians and newspaper barons argue, it is likely that the reverse is happening.
It is true that journalism, like all industries, is facing myriad pressures and turbulence, but clickbait is not the answer. When it comes to intrusion into grief, the NUJ has explicitly stated in its code that journalists should do “nothing to intrude into anybody’s private life, grief or distress unless justified by overriding consideration of the public interest”. The independent regulator Impress, to which no national title is signed up, has a similar clause. However, IPSO follows the Editors’ Code, which allows newspapers off the hook in cases such as ours, and does not explicitly address clickbait.
The good news is that recent research suggests clickbait may be losing its allure. Recent US research shows clickbait-style headlines often did not perform any better and, in some cases, performed worse than traditional headlines. Maybe readers are getting bored of a style that has become so ubiquitous, they speculated. Yet they also found that attempts to programme AI to spot and block clickbait had proven more complicated than anticipated.
Another study from Germany suggests that typical clickbait phrases might lead to a rise in click-through rates, but the articles fail to activate further user engagement thereafter. The researchers speculate that simplifying the news and reporting it in an engaging way could bring in new audiences, particularly young people. Some have tried this, including The News Movement, which aims to solve the undersupply of trusted, credible news on social media sites like TikTok.
And yet, what if frustration with the extent of hype and misinformation simply turns people, particularly young people, off news altogether? The danger, when trust is lost, is that it takes far longer to regain it.
Journalists are all too aware of the dangers of the trust issue at a time in world politics when independent journalism is of critical importance and democracy is under attack. There are some valiant attempts to address it, including The Trust Project, an international consortium of news organisations that promotes standards of transparency and works with technology platforms to affirm and amplify a commitment to quality, inclusive and fair journalism so that readers can make informed decisions about news. More attention is being devoted to digital literacy too, giving young people the skills to work out what is more likely to be true and what is more likely to be misinformation.
But clickbait is not just about misinformation and hype. It’s also about voyeurism and the hunger for ever more emotive content that focuses on individuals rather than broader, complex social issues. Social media doesn’t generally do complexity – or ethics.
The fact remains that news is increasingly shared on social media sites, and that these are by and large unregulated outside of Europe. It is largely left to social media sites to regulate themselves. We have seen what happens when the press self-regulates.
Without regulation, both of the press and social media companies, the commercial pressure to sell ‘content’ means there are likely to be more victims of bad practice and more distrust towards journalists.
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