The word clickbait is everywhere, but most people would struggle to define it precisely. At its core, clickbait refers to any headline or post designed not to inform you, but to get you to click. It prioritizes grabbing your attention over telling you the truth. And while it may seem like a minor annoyance, the research behind it reveals something more troubling about how the news industry actually works.
We Know It When We See It
Researchers who study clickbait admit that pinning down an exact definition is surprisingly difficult.1 The Oxford English Dictionary describes it simply as content whose main purpose is to attract attention and encourage visitors to click a link. But that definition does not explain why some headlines feel manipulative and others do not.
What scholars have found is that clickbait is not one single trick. It is a family of strategies, each pulling a different psychological lever. Two types stand out above the rest: information bait and rage bait.
Information Bait: The Curiosity Gap
Information bait works by leaving something out. The headline gives you just enough to feel curious, but not enough to feel satisfied. Phrases like Here’s what happened, This is why, or You won’t believe what came next are classic examples.2 The forward-referencing words point to an answer that exists only inside the article, forcing you to click to resolve the suspense.
This tactic exploits a well-documented quirk of human psychology. When we sense a gap in our knowledge, we experience a mild but real feeling of discomfort, and we are motivated to fill it.3 Clickbait headlines manufacture that feeling on purpose.
The strategy was made famous in the early 2010s by a website called Upworthy, which perfected the art of the curiosity-gap headline and at its peak attracted 88 million unique visitors per month.4 Facebook eventually adjusted its algorithm to stop rewarding that style of headline, but by then the technique had spread across the entire news industry.
Interestingly, despite how common information bait is, studies show it actually backfires by engagement metrics. Headlines that use curiosity-gap tactics consistently generate fewer likes, shares, and comments than straightforward headlines.4 Audiences have apparently caught on, and many now scroll past the you-won’t-believe-this format without clicking.
Rage Bait: The Outrage Engine
Rage bait is the more powerful and more dangerous variety. Instead of making you curious, it makes you angry. Headlines that mock, humiliate, or blame a specific person or group, headlines that frame every issue as an attack by an enemy, are designed to provoke a strong emotional reaction.4
Anger is not a passive emotion. Psychologists describe it as an approach emotion, meaning it pushes people toward action rather than away from it.4 That is exactly why it is so valuable to publishers: angry readers click, share, and comment at dramatically higher rates than calm ones. One major study found that rage bait headlines generated nearly three times more shares than non-rage bait headlines.4
The research also reveals a clear pattern in who uses rage bait most. Digital-born news outlets use it more than traditional legacy newspapers. And conservative-leaning outlets use it significantly more than liberal-leaning ones, a finding that held up across multiple measurement methods.4 This does not mean conservative readers are angrier by nature. It reflects the fact that some media outlets have made a calculated business decision to serve audiences who respond to outrage-driven content.
Why Publishers Do It
It would be easy to blame individual journalists for clickbait. But the real explanation is structural. When news moved online, individual articles lost the protection of their branded context. A story from a trusted newspaper looks identical to a story from a fringe website when both appear as links in your social media feed. Every headline must now compete for attention against every other post from friends, celebrities, and advertisers all at once.5
Publishers responded rationally to this pressure. Some now employ editors whose entire job is to rewrite headlines to maximize clicks. Algorithms reward content that generates engagement, so newsrooms produce more of whatever gets shared, regardless of its accuracy or depth.5 As one scholar put it, clickbait is not an accident of the internet. It is the internet’s attention economy working exactly as intended.6
Why It Matters
Rage bait in particular has consequences that go beyond bad journalism. Research consistently shows that anger makes people reason more superficially. It increases reliance on gut instinct and preexisting assumptions rather than careful thinking.4 An angry reader is more likely to share a headline without reading the article, more likely to believe information that confirms what they already think, and less likely to seek out opposing viewpoints.7
When the most engaging content is the most outrage-inducing content, and when platforms are designed to push the most engaging content to the top of every feed, the result is a media environment systematically optimized to keep people divided, misinformed, and emotionally activated. Clickbait is the visible surface of that system. Understanding how it works is the first step toward not being controlled by it.
Clickbait is just one piece of a larger system though. The headlines designed to make you angry or curious do not spread on their own. A significant portion of what goes viral online is amplified by automated accounts called bots, software programs that mimic real users and are built specifically to push certain content into your feed. In our next article, we look at what bots are, who deploys them, and how they shape what you think is popular.
Sources
- Chen, Y., Conroy, N. J., & Rubin, V. L. (2015). Misleading online content: Recognizing clickbait as false news. Proceedings of the 2015 ACM Workshop on Multimodal Deception Detection. https://doi.org/10.1145/2823465.2823467
- Blom, J. N., & Hansen, K. R. (2015). Click bait: Forward-reference as lure in online news headlines. Journal of Pragmatics, 76, 87–100. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2014.11.010
- Potthast, M., Köpsel, S., Stein, B., & Hagen, M. (2016). Clickbait detection. In Advances in Information Retrieval (pp. 810–817). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30671-1_72
- Shin, J., DeFelice, C., & Kim, S. (2025). Emotion sells: Rage bait vs. information bait in clickbait news headlines on social media. Digital Journalism, 13(7), 1271–1290. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2025.2505566
- Zhang, W. J., Yi, J., & Liang, H. (2023). I cue you liking me: Causal and spillover effects of technological engagement bait. Computers in Human Behavior, 148, 107864. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2023.107864
- Munger, K. (2020). All the news that’s fit to click: The economics of clickbait media. Political Communication, 37(3), 376–397. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2019.1687626
- Rathje, S., Van Bavel, J. J., & Van Der Linden, S. (2021). Out-group animosity drives engagement on social media. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(26). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2024292118