‘Knockout punch’ is entertainment, said YAHOO News. Maybe.

Like a fish that expertly lifts the worm from its hook, I’ve learned to avoid clickbait: posts with headlines like “You won’t believe this person exists!” next to a photo of a woman with two heads or what appears to be a person in the shape of a blob with arms.

I don’t know who’s behind those fishy stories and I don’t want to find out after they’ve infected my internet.

One day in February, after I signed out of email, my browser redirected itself to the Yahoo! homepage. There, I assume they’re using an algorithm to display stories that they believe I’d click on, and I often do scroll down the page, deciding if there’s any news worthy of my divided attention. (I use “news” loosely when referring Yahoo! which often comes across as The Enquirer of the Internet.)

As I scrolled, I came across this headline: “New Jersey police investigating disturbing ‘knockout game’ punch posted on Facebook.” The post was attributed to KABC-TV Los Angeles.

In the thumbnail, a wild-haired person stands next to a shorter person who is wearing a hooded jacket and looks as if he or she is about to cross the street. On the left side of the thumbnail, the unsuspecting pedestrian is splayed on the sidewalk.

I remembered a few years ago when the knockout game had become popular again, possibly thanks to the convenience of cellphone cameras and apps that allow easy clicking and sharing to social media.

I’d seen a couple when the news replayed them: one of an old man in New York, another of a lady on a borough sidewalk. The plot is always the same. Film bystander. Punch bystander. Laugh as bystander lies motionless on the ground, a supposed testament to the puncher’s strength, cleverness, and go-nowhere-in-life-ness.

Knowing how the story ends, I really had no reason to click on the link.

But I did.

The 42-second video lived up to its predetermined script. And though “disturbing,” the video didn’t alarm me nearly as much as Yahoo!’s treatment of it.

Below the video, I noticed that the news story was missing.

At the top of the headline, the breadcrumb (the marker that tells the reader what section of the website they’re in) shocked me more than the punch:

“Entertainment.”

I clicked back to the homepage.

There, again above the post:

“Entertainment.”

Back at the video, I looked below the empty space where content should have been — a quote from local police, an identification of where the post was found, a line about whether there were any leads from social media — and saw the only thing that maybe explains why Yahoo even posted the video in the first place: the comment count was at over 3,000. (Today, those comments have topped 5,000.)

I’m not sure who curates web content at Yahoo. At best, it’s The Great Algorithm programmed to log fighting videos as entertainment. At worst, it’s a real person. In either case, tagging a criminal act as entertainment might support the notion that the digital age is desensitizing us in more ways we’d care to admit.

The proliferation of YouTube knock-out punches and Sharkeishas and reality television Teen Moms delivering front-yard beat downs now move from urban-legend to primetime, from figurative to actual figures on smartphone screens and laptops, altering us all, if ever so slightly as to what is truly alarming, changing, if even minutely, what we find distract-worthy, disguising the real reason why we click, and changing how “disturbed” we really are.

And as the video automatically looped, I wondered as I watched it again, if Yahoo! was right. Maybe, in some way, I was entertained.