Check Out How Sensational News Headlines RUIN TAIWAN…
From the title, three major compoenets consist this click-bait headline
- typical sentences like “check out…how…””X things you don’t know about…”“”the whole world is startled at…” to spark on people’s curiosity
- capitalized and exaggerated titles to MAKE THIS PIECE OF NEWS MORE CLICK-WORTHY
- three little dots at the end to augment the sense of mystery, sometimes question mark will do the job as well
To make it even more clickable, you can add on tons of emotionally-intense emojis and colorful thumbnails with gigantic and bolded fonts 😍😭💩💅👯❤️💛💚💙💜 This is what most of the news we see on Facebook nowadays.
To attract more clicks and higher circulation, every form of online media such as tabloid, magzines or digital media like Buzzfeed, try really hard to create their most eye-catching headlines on social platforms. The “click-bait” culture becomes the new norm. However, in Taiwan, this phenomenon creeps into news media which is supposed to be the most professional and trust-worthy channels for people to gain knowledge. What's more, in order to adapt to Facebook's constantly-changing algorithm so as to assure its posts can be first seen on readers' feed, some media is getting this online game dirty.
click-baiting
Obviously, those are typical click-baiting tricks. Calling a person someone’s wife instead of stating the full name to draw readers' attention is not only degradatory but disrespectful. Melinda Gates is no one's accessory. And deliberately referring Bill Gates as “the richest man” but not his name is purely senseless. Also in the second news, LTN turned a serious warfare matter into a piece of article that looks like is published by content farm.
heating up readers' hatred
When facing crime acts, it is crucial for media to report it on an objective gorund without personal judgement. Apparently, two examples above do not follow the rule. It is understandable for media to stir up readers’ emotion to increase reader interaction or higher public discussion rate. However, ranting someone “rubbish”, “shitty”, and “nerdy” is just way too far. In spite of the fact that they are morally-deficient, it is just no way to justify the act of speaking nastily of someone, especially a media wielding enormous influence on people.
being sensual and vulgar
I was utterly shocked first seeing these and have no words for them. Plainly tasteless and unclassy. Media back in the time was thought to be educating people, but now? The message hidden behind these posts is to teach people how to objectify a female. By selling nudity and indecent body image concept, those media indeed boosts up their Facebook likes.
siding with readers
I also notice that press in Taiwan likes to “bribe” audience as siding with the majority of readers and attacking governments or ocassionally high-profile people with power/money. Politic is always a highly debatable subject, the hostility toward acting authority can be really bad at times. There is no need to exacerbate the tense relation between the people and the government but it is supposed to bridge the two parties and build up communication.
covering only half the story
On PTT (Taiwanese version of Reddit), netizens call this kind of title "標題殺人法", literal meaning as "title-killing method", which is used to describe a sensational headline can kill/ruin a person. By stating partial truth or an extraction of a long quotation to flasely create an impression that does not exactly fit the true story. As saying "chrome will be ended" and omitting "web store", the intention to cause discussion is obvious. The problem lies in the second news is in fact subtle, but if reader who do not click on the article, the political tag that a celebrity (specially active in Taiwan/Hong Kong/China) fears the most is difficult to wash off.
The intention of this article is not to trash Taiwan's own media. The point here is to point out the problems and make people to be more conscious of what they are reading everyday. It is important to distinguish the fact and have the ability to do research individually instead of believing all of them, particularly a big portion of people only read the news titles as try to scroll down more on Facebook on their way to work. Finally, I hope people out there from different places reading this article can comment below and share with other readers what problems of the media are happening right now in your own country.
