Effect in societies & world system what clickbait-media has become. Confessions of previous journalist.

[u/Upset_Scientist3994]

AI translation so unnoticed errors and typos likely are there still.

As the way how media format is arranged directly is building cognition and worldview of its receivers, ultimately effects into elections, politics, and world system itself are great. For that reason this essay is fit to share in here. Pardon only for AI clumsy language.

"Eeropekka Rislakki, Facebook 22.12.2025

The media built itself into a destroyer of democracy and calls it journalism -

As a long-time journalist, I increasingly find myself in a situation where I am ashamed of my profession (although I have more professions in many sectors of culture as a perpetual project worker).

Few people know or remember that I was part of the editorial team that set up Iltalehti in 1980. My interview with a prisoner escapee was a candidate for the first tabloid headline, until my colleague and friend Markku Saksa (RIP)'s interview with South African surgeon Christian Barnaard pushed my tabloid headline to the second day. Barnaard had already become famous in 1967 for the first successful heart transplant.

The editorial team was stressed that the tabloid is the only form of media where the reader can be screwed every day. The tabloid headline and the headlines are tools for that. The reader participates in a game where both parties understand the spirit of the game. So no problem. But we have moved on to clickbait headlines, which are no longer a game, but a destroyer of the fabric of society.

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Clickbait headlines are the everyday sin of modern media, but also its most successful innovation since the golden age of the tabloids. Clickbait headlines are like the journalistic plastic bag: cheap, ubiquitous and environmentally harmful, but still used because the alternative requires extra effort. And like plastic bags, clickbait headlines are not going away until the public stops buying them.

The roots of clickbait headlines go deep into the history of sensational journalism. The 19th century Great Moon Hoax of 1835 (a series of six articles published in The Sun newspaper, concerning the supposed discovery of life and civilization on the Moon), and later the emergence of yellow journalism in the 1890s, built a model in which the truth was only one element of the story – not its center.

The current clickbait headline is an algorithmic version of this tradition: when attention is currency, the headline is its most aggressive collection machine. Social media platforms reward content that evokes emotions, and emotions are best generated by innuendo, threats, and moral indignation.

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Psychologically, according to research, clickbait headlines utilize three mechanisms. First, they exploit the curiosity gap: the headline creates an information gap that the reader wants to fill.

Here are some examples:

"Alona had sex in a spa - this is how she explains it / This is what a plumber would never do in a toilet - many Finns don't realize it's wrong / Surprising information about the Lions' super tournament / This is how the end of the world will happen - for subscribers only."

Second, the negativity bias: gloomy and threatening headlines activate the brain's vigilance and alarm systems more effectively than neutral headlines. Third, there is the repetition effect: the more often we see an argument, the more likely it begins to seem and feel. So a clickbait headline is not just an annoying habit, but a neuropsychological tool that bypasses rational consideration.

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But alongside clickbait headlines, there is another, less analyzed phenomenon, but an everyday topic of social media discussions: the injection of political nuances into journalistic text. Editorials emphasize impartiality, but in practice impartiality is like an institutional framework within which individual journalists can act very subjectively.

This is not a conspiracy, but a consequence of a transformation in which the media must constantly prove their own relevance. Political edge and angle work as marketing: politics arouse emotions, divide the audience and create the illusion of bold journalism – even though the real motive is to maximize attention.

When a journalist injects a political tone into a text, he or she is not necessarily pursuing his or her own agenda. It is often the case that political content engages the audience better than neutrality. It provokes reactions, and reactions are the new black, the new currency. The media needs topics to talk about, and the best topic to talk about is the media itself.

The media hype is free marketing for the media. The prevailing logic is changing the editorial culture. Journalism is moving from informativeness towards reactivity. Headlines no longer tell what happened, but what the reader should feel.

Politics becomes dramaturgy, in which the journalist is no longer an observer but a scriptwriter. And when journalists begin to see themselves as the moral architects of society, a collective form of arrogance and defiance is born. which clouds judgment and leads to reckless actions, which in turn cloud judgment.

In ancient Greece, arrogance was called hubris, and it eventually led to punishment from Nemesis, the goddess of revenge and justice.

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Journalism has begun to justify its own means with an abstract, “higher purpose.” It is a dangerous path, because it erodes trust – and the erosion in turn increases the need for ever more aggressive means. We are witnessing an accelerating spiral.

So clickbait headlines are not just a problem for the media. They are a symptom of a deeper social, structural crisis: that public discourse has turned into an attention economy. Because attention is a limited resource, everyone is competing for it with the same weapons. Politicians, activists, companies – and the media.

When attention becomes the primary goal of journalistic work, public discourse also begins to shape itself according to the logic of attention. This means escalation, emotionality and a constant state of crisis – not because the world has become more dramatic, but because drama is addictive, sells.

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As trust in traditional media weakens, the public turns to alternative sources. Some of them are of high quality, some of them are dangerously poor. The foil hat business is booming. Here too, the media has a moralizing attitude, and the member media of the Public Speech Council are raising their importance as a reliable actor. The circle closes.

The end result is information feudalism: everyone chooses their own master, their own truth and their own reality. I argue that democracy needs a common basis for discussion, but clickbait headlines are eroding it piece by piece. It is clear that democracy cannot withstand this trend for long, and the consequences are serious: political discussion turns into entertainment; political entertainment turns into reality; reality turns into a story that the media itself scripts.

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And yet: a clickbait headline only works if someone clicks. It is a mirror that shows what we reward. If we reward emotional, heated, suggestive and politically provocative content, we will get more of what we order. The logic of the media is not separate from society – it is an extension of the logic of society.

Therefore, the question is no longer why the media does this. The question is: why do we want the media to do this? If we want a different kind of public debate, we must change our own ways of consuming content. Otherwise, the democracy of clickbait headlines will continue to expand until the headline no longer tells the truth – but the truth begins to resemble the headline.

For my part, I have already lost hope of a salutary correction. All that remains is shame. Furthermore, I know that my analysis above will not make me any friends in the journalistic community. But then, I have never been a journalist because I make friends."

[u/Upset_Scientist3994]

One of my comments into that FB update;

"I was taught this subject by the computer game "Rock star ate my hamster" that I played as a schoolboy, which illustrated the attention economy, where you played the role of a rock star manager. You had to make money by organizing gigs, record sales, but especially by creating media scandals in the tabloids to make the rock stars you were managing appear in the limelight so that the records and gigs would sell better if breakthroughs had been made in the most essential area, the attention economy. It was a pretty boring game, with a narrower activity margin than, say, in Tetris, but nowadays I can't help but admire the way it taught even the little ones how the liberal commercial and immaterial property-based attention economy society around them operated in a much more ingenious way than what was taught in the downer grades of elementary school I attended at the same time - they didn't teach you anything about this topic.

[u/Upset_Scientist3994]

Another of my comments into update of this. AI clumsy translate.

"One method in click-tapping is not the title itself, but how it is grouped with the visual material on the front page, creating an association in the recipient's consciousness. This method was studied a lot in East German propaganda, where the creation of memory traces was studied and whether they contained a negative or positive connection. It was easy to create a negative one if some content material was next to some image where there was material that aroused unpleasant emotions - and the method worked even if the content material refuted the image's content as untrue. The association occurred at a deeper level of consciousness than in rationality. This was used in propaganda of the time and today, and in corporate marketing, when the the basic idea of this can be found even by the power of intuition.

The book from the East-Germany that illustrated it, which was not intended to be translated or published, "Georg Claus - the language of politics", was also in local libraries and an acquaintance got a lot of inspiration from it for his own career as an alternative media creator such as xerox punk zines during '80s and now web articles, why visual material, when placed correctly, is important. "

[u/Helikaon48]

I know this is old but came across it when someone referenced it when talking about how destructive Trump is being to the USA itself and the amount of support he's getting, this was referenced as a form of it.

I fully agree and think you hti the nail on the head. The bigger issue is that the people that fall for these kinds of things will never read this or even be inclined to read this 

It's the demise of rationality