The Clickbait – Professional and Ethical Codes of Conduct

The Clickbait – Professional and Ethical Codes of Conduct
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Introduction
Technology allows people to access any information, whether private or public, due to the increase in the platforms that convey these, such as the newspapers, television, radio, and the internet. The internet is the most accessible platform from this list, secondary to the increase in mobile phones, mobile phone applications, and websites that readily disseminate the news. Due to its broad coverage, the internet is prone to abuses the bypass the professional and ethical standards on knowledge and information dissemination online. This is secondary to clickbait, a form of attraction online to encourage the readers to click a link on the web page. The clickbait provides more significant revenue to the advertisers and the goods, products, or services advertised and causes possible harm to the reader (Munger, 2020). The clickbait promotion endorses a questionable quality of information mediated by deception that targets the audience’s curiosity and emotions, thereby bypassing the importance of honest communication.
Ethical Communication
            Ethical communication signifies the quality and structure of content and the appropriate media used to propagate the information. The significant elements of ethical communication include consistency, honesty, and accountability. Specifically, transparency is vital in forming relationships with all the other stakeholders. The content writer needs to consider possible communication restrictions such as language barriers, accessibility of digital media, and the use of jargon. Moreover, sound ethical reasoning is necessary to scrutinize the facts of a published data to promote the content’s accuracy. All of this contributes to the impact of information on an organization, the involved groups of people, and the general audience (Tompkins, 2015).
The Five Key Ethical Values
            These include justice, truth, freedom, care, and integrity. Justice, in any of its forms, satisfies all the criteria of morality. Justice promotes empathy, and empathy promotes a universal kind of care congruent to society’s ulterior motive (Hoffman, 2001). A clickbait fails to differentiate various factors in the media. Therefore, policies should be made to ensure that advertisements and articles protect the national interest. The principle of justice relates to delineating what is acceptable and unacceptable without sacrificing the other ethical values, such as care and integrity (Litschka, 2019).
            Truthfulness leads to the integrity of one’s work. This can only be achieved by showing 100% facts. Resorting to 99% accuracy of information does not entail truthfulness. Even 1% of this is regarded as deception. Thus, without truthfulness, the reports can never be genuinely reliable. The rest, such as freedom and care, follows when truthfulness is prioritized (Mandelbaum, 2020).     
Review of Literature: The Clickbait
The Problem
            The clickbait bypasses the ethical standards which promote justice and accountability. Its profitability often inspires the creation of a clickbait to the advertisers and the company advertised. Thus, the issue of the misleading information provided by clickbait is often disregarded as a minor problem. However, the bigger picture becomes neglected because this distorts the audience’s right to information, thereby hampering their freedom of speech. Furthermore, the clickbait promotion fuels the industry to produce many irresponsible contents that lead to deception (Munger, 2020).
            A clickbait is usually in the form of a headline. It has been a concern among scholars and journalists because an individual’s perception can have a massive domino effect that can influence even national decisions, such as during Presidential Elections. Previous studies revealed that catchy headlines could transform a criminal suspect’s guilt, improve political candidates’ rating, and modify the news’s understanding and memory, both published in paper and online. When this happens, the issue transforms from an individual to the national level because the result of such cases, such as national elections, can lead to positive or negative notions, such as increased violence and discrimination (Scacco & Muddiman, 2016).
Identifying a Clickbait
            Various forms of headlines can be used as clickbait. The traditional news headlines utilize the inverted pyramid style where most information can be reflected in the title. This gives an overview of the story. The forward-reference headlines do more confusion about the correct information. Last, the question-based headlines pose doubts to the story by interrogating the content through a question title. The answer to the question can be found once the reader browses through the article (Scacco & Muddiman, 2016).
            Scacco & Muddiman (2016) investigated these headlines’ effectivity as a clickbait in 2,057 American adults in January 2016. The experiment was done together with various news sources in the U.S., such as USA Today, Fox News/MSNBC, and BuzzFeed. Each participant was shown particular headlines, and the researchers noted their reactions and changes in perception. The results are as follows: 1) Question-based headlines harm the reader. The readers readily react negatively due to their opposing expectations of the article. Moreover, readers become less engaged with the story compared to the traditional headlines. Traditional headlines are more associated with positive outcomes, but there is no significant difference between traditional and forward-reference headlines.; 2) Headlines should be appropriately paired with a specific social issue. Results have shown that question-based headlines paired with national issues, such as problems facing Congress, resulted in a substantial adverse reaction compared to written using a traditional headline.; 3) The clickbait headline’s impact varies from the news source’s brand and how the readers perceive the story. This is because of the diversity in the news article’s expectations regarding a particular website. For instance, The New York Times usually utilizes traditional styles versus BuzzFeed, which uses a mixture of headline styles (Scacco & Muddiman, 2016).
            Another form of clickbait is tabloid journalism, which promotes sensationalization and hyperbole, which leads to an exaggerated public response, even to a minor issue. Tabloids utilize random and unvalidated information and use “rumors” to disseminate the news (Chen et al., 2015).
            In social media, advertisers rely on viral marketing, which uses “teaser messages.” These messages contain a short text, an elective media attachment (i.e., short videos, GIFs, or images), and a link to the publisher’s webpage where the advertised products or services can be found. It is called...