Clickbait is an recent epidemic that has overtaken the internet in certain spots, specifically on social media such as Facebook and YouTube. Clickbait is an eye catching link on a website which encourages people to read it. It is often paid for by the advertiser or generates income based on the number of clicks. These links are extremely suspicious often contain malicious material to which download, or is already downloaded the second anyone clicks on it. Clickbait aims to exploit a person’s “curiosity gap,” by providing just enough information to make the reader curious, but they aren’t satisfied until they click on it.

The main problem with these articles is that they are a perfect example of yellow journalism where they are extremely pointless and include little or no legitimate well-researched news. There are many examples of clickbait, however the biggest one was on Facebook. I was scrolling through thousands of posts then all of a sudden an article grabbed my attention,  “The Side of Miranda Cosgrove That No One Ever Talks About.” It was obvious that it was clickbait but my curiosity got the better of me and I decided to click on it to see what it was. The lackluster article was about Cosgrove going to a grocery store to overhear a mother and her son taking of “the current president at the time, Abraham Lincoln.” The boy wanted to grow up like him but his mother said that “A black man will never be a president” Miranda inspired the boy to be president, and, apparently that boy was Barack Obama. After clicking on this article, the antivirus on my computer luckily caught a virus that was sent by the website.

The biggest offender of this has to be Buzzfeed, Cosmopolitan and Upworthy. In 2014 many users backlashed against the use of this by installing ad blockers to significantly reduce if not completely eliminate, all advertisements including clickbait. A personal one that I use is AdBlock Pro, that not only makes my use of the web more convenient, but also safer. I recommend this not only because free, but also it’s extremely easy to use and setup.