The clickbait media economy is toxic

It’s easy to blame the mainstream media for hounding celebrities but that ignores the demand side of the market.

You can trace the news values of the tabloid media via the extremity of the UK Royal Family from Lady Diana Spencer in the 1990s to Meghan Markle more than thirty years later.

Stories about people in the public eye such as celebrities, politicians and sportsmen and women sell newspapers. They also drive clicks and engagement on social media.

There is no other explanation for the popularity of media such as The Daily Mail and The Sun. Likewise the brands and advertising income that these media attract.

Add an emotional trigger such as greed, envy or jealousy, and you’ve landed on the formula for the clickbait economy. Note that these are almost always negative rather than positive human traits.

It’s a market in which news value takes second place to headlines written to bait attention and create a visceral reaction, rather than inform or educate.

Polarising opinion drives shares and reactions on social media. The Facebook and Twitter newsfeeds algorithms reward this behaviour. There is no room for discussion or nuanced debate. It’s a cesspit.

It’s a market that treats individuals as commodities and has no respect or thought for the person behind the social media profile.

There’s a paradox at play. Posts on social media tag individuals but dehumanise and normalise their vilification. It’s not how you’d treat someone in real life.

The human cost is the untimely death of Paula Yates, Amy Winehouse, most recently Caroline Flack, and others.

Fake news has emerged as a term in the vernacular in the past three years to describe exaggeration and disinformation.

Clickbait describes content published for no other benefit than to drive attention. It’s a zero-sum game in which the outrageous wins.

The Sun’s news values and editorial policy was placed under sharp scrutiny yesterday following the death of Caroline Flack when it deleted negative stories about the celebrity from its archives.

It will get worse before it gets better. The Government has revealed its intention to slim down the BBC and radically overhaul its funding model.

Alan Rusbridger, former Guardian editor said it’s a lousy moment to scrap the one publicly-held and universally available source of broadly reliable and trusted news.

What can you do? Don’t buy or share content from mainstream newspapers without checking facts, consider the individual(s) involved and be discerning in your use of social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

But ultimately there’s a much bigger issue in play that relates to regulation. The click bait economy is a market driven by rage. It’s broken.

In the UK the media and social media are regulated by Ipso and Ofcom. They need to sharpen their teeth.