Why We Can't Stop Sharing Clickbait
And What To Do About It
Every morning, I mute another person on my personal social media.
Today it was my uncle, sharing his third conspiracy theory before breakfast. His posts always follow the same pattern: a shocking headline, a demand that we "wake up to the truth," and an urgent call to share it with everyone we know. Yesterday it was a climate change denier, armed with a debunked study and the tagline "what the mainstream media won't tell you."
This endless cycle of sensational claims and urgent sharing isn't just annoying, it reveals a fundamental shift in how we consume and spread information online. Where family debates once ended with the Sunday roast, social media has created an always-on platform for converting others to our viewpoints. And clickbait serves as ammunition.
The exhaustion from this constant bombardment shows a deeper problem. Clickbait hasn't just changed how we share information as it's transformed how we relate to truth itself. Understanding this transformation requires looking beyond individual posts to examine why we're so eager to spread what we read, whether it's true or not.
The Psychology Behind Sharing
Our relationship with online sharing begins in our most basic psychological drivers. At its core, sharing information serves fundamental human needs. These are the desire to connect, to be valued by our peers, and to make sense of our world. None of these are new needs. They're the same ones that once drove us to share news in village squares and over garden fences. What's changed is the scale, speed, and machinery of how we share.
These fundamental needs explain why we're particularly vulnerable to sharing false information. In a world of information overload, shocking or controversial content offers an immediate way to fulfil these needs. Sharing a conspiracy theory makes us feel like we're protecting our loved ones. Spreading "hidden truths" positions us as valuable information sources in our communities. Even sharing clearly dubious content gives us a sense of belonging with those who share our doubts and fears. The very aspects that make clickbait obvious to outsiders - its sensationalism, its urgency, its claim to hidden knowledge - make it perfectly designed to satisfy our deepest social and emotional needs.
The mechanics of social media have supercharged these natural instincts. Each share creates a feedback loop. When we post something, we receive immediate social validation through likes and comments,. Therefore we feel compelled to share again. This isn't just habit-forming as it shapes how we choose what to share. Content that generates quick responses becomes more appealing, regardless of its accuracy or value.
Our brain's decision-making processes make us particularly vulnerable to clickbait's appeal. We operate on two systems: our fast, intuitive responses (System 1) and our slower, analytical thinking (System 2). Clickbait creators deliberately target System 1, as it trigger immediate emotional responses through System 1. Headlines such as "shocking discoveries" create curiosity gaps we feel compelled to fill. "Urgent warnings" activate our fear of missing crucial information. By the time our analytical System 2 thinking engages, we've often already hit share.
These individual psychological responses derive their potency through group dynamics. The act of sharing content is more than mere information dissemination. Instead is functions as a mechanism of social signalling within digital communities. Individuals leverage each share as a performative expression of identity, strategically positioning themselves within their chosen social networks. Within these tightly-networked online groups, content sharing operates as a nuanced ritual of group affirmation. This also simultaneously establishes and reinforces social hierarchies.
Our cognitive shortcuts further complicate this. The availability heuristic leads us to judge information as important when it's easy to remember. Furthermore, clickbait headlines are deliberately crafted for memorability. The fluency heuristic makes easily processed information feel more trustworthy, while confirmation bias draws us toward content that matches our existing beliefs. These mental shortcuts, once crucial for survival, now make us vulnerable to manipulation.
Memory itself plays a crucial role in this. Clickbait creators understand that emotional, simple, and surprising content sticks in our minds. When information is easy to recall, our brains automatically tag it as significant. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle as memorable content feels important, making us more likely to share it, which in turn makes it more memorable to others.
These psychological mechanisms don't operate in isolation as they leverage our sharing behaviour. Understanding this complexity helps explain why current solutions often fail. We're not just fighting bad content as we're grappling with the fundamental architecture of human psychology in a digital age.
The Ecosystem That Enables Spread
Our online world reflects how we naturally share and connect, just much faster and wider. Social media platforms often succeed with those in mind. While some blame these platforms for spreading clickbait, they primarily mirror and amplify human behaviour. The algorithms that choose what content to show us respond to what people naturally engage with most.
These algorithms create feedback loops that trap us in comfortable bubbles of information. When we engage with certain types of content, the system shows us more of the same. This creates echo chambers where we mainly see content that matches our existing views. While this makes our feeds feel more relevant, it limits our exposure to different perspectives.
Content creators have learned to work within this system. They craft stories and headlines that appeal to our sharing instincts, competing for attention in an increasingly crowded digital space. Some creators focus on producing valuable, accurate content that serves their audiences. Others chase engagement through sensational headlines and misleading content, knowing that emotional triggers often drive more action than factual reporting.
Within this ecosystem, a web of bad actors often exploit platform features. A further analysis shows that their roles and methods often blur and overlap. What begins as an individual troll posting inflammatory content for entertainment might evolve into a micro-influencer monetizing outrage. Solo operators frequently drift into loose networks, sharing tactics in private channels while maintaining independent personas. These informal collaborations can become testing grounds for more sophisticated manipulation techniques.
Content farms blur the lines further, often recruiting individual trolls who are skilled at baiting engagement. These operations might simultaneously run automated networks while maintaining stables of authentic-seeming accounts. A single actor might wear multiple hats: running automated accounts, manually crafting viral content, and coordinating with others through private channels.
Even state-sponsored campaigns and commercial influence operations don't operate in isolation. They monitor and learn from successful individual trolls, sometimes amplifying organic content that serves their purposes. Their staff might moonlight as independent operators or run personal campaigns using techniques learned from their professional work. The result is an ecosystem where categories constantly shift and merge, with techniques and tactics flowing freely between different depths of requirement.
The financial incentives create additional complexity. Individual trolls might unknowingly serve larger operations' goals while pursuing their own profit. Small networks can become contractors for bigger campaigns while maintaining apparently independent identities. The boundaries between personal agenda, profit motive, and coordinated manipulation have become increasingly indistinct.
Understanding this complex ecosystem helps us see that fighting clickbait and false information isn't simply about blaming platforms or users. Each share, like, or comment sends signals that algorithms use to decide what more people should see. This explains why we continue sharing questionable content even when we suspect it might be false. The ecosystem creates a perfect storm where our psychological needs align with platform incentives and bad actor tactics.
We share because it feels good, because it strengthens our social bonds, because we've been expertly manipulated, and because the system itself rewards this behaviour. Each of these forces amplifies the other, making it increasingly difficult to step back and evaluate content critically.
The Impact and Path Forward
At the individual level, constant exposure to misleading content erodes critical thinking skills and creates what researchers call "truth fatigue". This a state where distinguishing fact from fiction becomes exhausting and people begin to disengage from information entirely. Local organizations struggle to communicate important information when competing with sensationalized content, while public health initiatives face unnecessary resistance fuelled by misleading articles.
The technological challenge is more invasion than we would admit. AI-generated content makes detecting false information increasingly difficult, while deep fake technology threatens to undermine video evidence as a reliable source of truth. Social platforms' attempts to combat these issues often create unintended consequences, with enforcement actions frequently reinforcing the very beliefs they aim to counter.
The complexity of human psychology makes this challenge particularly thorny. When content is flagged as false, many viewers interpret this as proof of suppression, wearing these flags as badges of honour. Attempts to correct false information often backfire, strengthening people's commitment to false beliefs rather than changing their minds. The more aggressively platforms try to control the spread of misleading content, the more some communities view this as validation of their alternative narratives.
This creates a paradox at the heart of our information ecosystem. The very mechanisms designed to promote truth can end up undermining it, while attempts to build trust often breeds deeper scepticism. Traditional approaches to content moderation and fact-checking increasingly appear to be inadequate for addressing these deeply rooted psychological and social dynamics.
Understanding why we share false information reveals a painful truth: we do it because it meets real human needs. Those who share clickbait aren't simply misinformed or malicious as they're often seeking connection, meaning, and validation in a complex world. This insight suggests that perhaps the path forward isn't about correcting facts, but about addressing the underlying needs.
After all, only humans share facts with other humans.
The future of online sharing remains uncertain. While the challenges are clear, the path forward is less so.
Perhaps it starts with a simple question across a Sunday dinner table: "Uncle, what makes you say that?"