Basically, stop clicking on them. If you don’t want the media feeding you a steady diet of nonsense then stop eating it. You know full well that many titles are clickbait but you can’t quite stop yourself from clicking to ‘just find out’.

That’s perfectly natural and completely self defeating. Here’s the thing – this is one of those cases where you really can have your cake and eat it too. Yes, I’m serious. Here’s how.

You see the post in your feed or title in your email and you are just dying to know. Of course it’s clickbait, you aren’t stupid, but you just have to know whether Elvis had an alien’s baby (short answer, no, quit being silly). The answer is just one click away and your hand is on the button…

Take your hand off the button, scroll up to the search bar and type in the title. I use Duckduckgo so it will open another tab if I tell it to but if you don’t have that feature, just open another tab. You already have 500 open, what’s one more?

Okay, I might be projecting a bit on that last part. Anywho, pick a search engine and enter that delicious clickbait headline. Skip Wikipedia and the website that posted the clickbait. Find an article that covers the headline. Click that and read all the juicy details.

I’d use Duckduckgo or Brave rather than Google since they don’t track you. No tracking, no reward for the clickbait title for whoever wrote the thing and Google doesn’t start showing you weird ads for alien Elvis babies.

Sure, you can copy and paste but get in the habit of typing for this. Why? Because if you aren’t interested enough to type ‘Elvis Moon Baby’ into a search engine, you probably aren’t really interested, are you? Making it a habit to type out the search will force you to think about whether you really care all that much about an alien that can sing ‘Jail House Rock‘. After a while, you’ll find that you aren’t spending nearly as much time on obvious clickbait.

Sure, you’ll still have occasions when you just absolutely have to know if Keanu Reeves really has three clones in storage on Mars (no, yes, who cares?). Go ahead, search for the answer and scratch that curiosity itch. But as you spend less time on clickbait you’ll find it less addicting. Won’t happen overnight and there may never be a time when you don’t want to know if Dick Clark will host New Year’s Rockin’ Eve again (I certainly hope not! Leave the poor man alone!) but you will find that you can live without knowing how to cure conditions you aren’t even the right gender to have.

As people stop responding to clickbait, advertisers and scammers will move on to other techniques. That’s fine. Advertisers are just trying to get their product in front of people. Annoying as it can be sometimes, it is nice to know who to call when the washing machine explodes. The fewer tools in the scammer toolbox, the better. Win-win as far as I can see.

Okay, but what about other headlines? China is about five months overdue for its collapse according to YouTube.

It’s the same thing. Headlines are designed to get attention and be as close to truthful as possible. The media is a bit iffy on that last part but they get attention the old fashioned way: scare the dickens out of people.

Unless you are literally living in a war zone, the odds that a given headline will mean the end of life as you know it are next to zero. The information in the article may very well be important but China isn’t surpassing the US anytime soon and we’re not on the verge of civil or nuclear war, no matter what the headline or title card says.

You can fight it the same way – don’t fall for it. Go to another source you trust or look it up on a search engine. Don’t just click the first crazy headline you see.

And don’t bother reading the first three paragraphs. Yes, I’m serious. All the important stuff is in the bottom of the article, not the top.

It can be a pain. One of my favorite YouTube personalities is convinced the country is heading for civil war based on polling that is best suited for lining birdcages or wrapping fish. I skip his most provocative titles and catch his less sensational stuff. Fortunately, he is prolific so it doesn’t take long before I find out what he was talking about in the video I didn’t watch.

Other times, I just go find someone else talking about the same thing minus the melodrama. Being fair here, there’s a lot of pressure on creators to use clickbait and hyped titles to get views and therefore paid. But we’re part of that problem when we respond to the hype. If we are selective in what we click and view, creators and advertisers will adjust accordingly. No, not overnight, but nothing is actually that fast.

Especially not those diet pills in that ad you’re eying.