WEBVTT - Ep145 Why do we compulsively click on ragebait? with Angele Christin 0:00:05.040 --> 0:00:09.120 How do the algorithms that were surrounded with shape our lives? 0:00:09.520 --> 0:00:13.160 Why does a journalist begin to write differently once metrics 0:00:13.240 --> 0:00:19.720 are introduced? What is algorithmic capture? Has clickbait always existed? 0:00:20.079 --> 0:00:22.880 What did that look like before the Internet? How could 0:00:22.920 --> 0:00:28.000 even vegan content creators go in for rage bait? What 0:00:28.080 --> 0:00:30.080 does any of this have to do with why someone 0:00:30.360 --> 0:00:34.040 would insist on cooking pasta in the bathtub? Or the 0:00:34.159 --> 0:00:39.440 nineteenth century actress Sarah Bernhardt or one weird trick or 0:00:40.040 --> 0:00:43.880 Oxford English Dictionary's word of the year. Join me today 0:00:43.920 --> 0:00:48.280 with sociologist Angel Christen as we talk about how algorithms 0:00:48.479 --> 0:00:56.960 invisibly sculpt human behavior. Welcome to Intercosmos with me David Eagleman. 0:00:57.080 --> 0:01:00.800 I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford An. These episodes, 0:01:00.840 --> 0:01:04.520 we sail deeply into our three pound universe to understand 0:01:04.640 --> 0:01:07.520 why and how our lives look the way they do. 0:01:24.720 --> 0:01:27.880 Every brain is trying to navigate itself through a very 0:01:28.000 --> 0:01:33.280 social world, and it's always unconsciously making predictions to figure 0:01:33.319 --> 0:01:36.040 things out like what should I pay attention to or 0:01:36.080 --> 0:01:37.679 what is worth my time? 0:01:38.040 --> 0:01:39.320 What should I care about? 0:01:40.040 --> 0:01:44.039 And for essentially the entirety of human history, those signals 0:01:44.040 --> 0:01:46.479 came from other humans. 0:01:46.560 --> 0:01:47.680 You read a lot. 0:01:47.520 --> 0:01:50.760 Of information from the expressions on their faces like a 0:01:51.280 --> 0:01:55.720 raised eyebrow. You hear things in the tone of people's voices. 0:01:55.800 --> 0:01:59.560 You modify your behavior if you are getting signals of 0:01:59.600 --> 0:02:03.160 approof or disapproval, not just from your parents, but more 0:02:03.320 --> 0:02:07.320 generally from your tribe. Our brains have worked with these 0:02:07.360 --> 0:02:11.160 sorts of signals for millions of years. You're looking for 0:02:11.560 --> 0:02:15.119 a nod of approval, or people laugh at what you say, 0:02:15.200 --> 0:02:19.760 or they scowl at it or whatever. But now imagine 0:02:19.840 --> 0:02:25.239 replacing all that with numbers. Now you've got a dashboard 0:02:25.600 --> 0:02:28.320 and a counter that ticks upward, and you've got a 0:02:28.440 --> 0:02:32.160 graph that rises or falls, and it's all in real time, 0:02:32.520 --> 0:02:36.600 and you have a notification that says three four hundred 0:02:36.639 --> 0:02:41.799 people watched this or twelve people watched this. So, all 0:02:41.800 --> 0:02:45.560 of a sudden, in this past nanosecond of human evolution, 0:02:46.120 --> 0:02:50.000 we are suddenly in an era when the signals that 0:02:50.200 --> 0:02:56.320 guide our behavior are not primarily human faces, but instead metrics. 0:02:56.360 --> 0:03:00.600 You've got numbers and rankings, you've got dashboards, and it's 0:03:00.720 --> 0:03:05.160 based on algorithms that you can't really see. And these 0:03:05.200 --> 0:03:09.200 algorithms decide what appears in front of us and what disappears. 0:03:09.680 --> 0:03:14.359 And here's the wild part. When those signals change, we change, 0:03:14.560 --> 0:03:19.600 often unconsciously. Writers will change what they write based on 0:03:19.639 --> 0:03:23.720 the feedback. Creators will change what they're about based on 0:03:23.760 --> 0:03:27.840 the feedback. Sometimes there are subtle ways this happens, like 0:03:28.120 --> 0:03:31.239 someone tweaks the headline, or they make a video shorter, 0:03:31.480 --> 0:03:35.200 or they spend more time thinking about a stronger hook. 0:03:35.520 --> 0:03:41.840 But pretty quickly, entire professions can reorganize themselves around these 0:03:41.960 --> 0:03:47.080 invisible feedback systems. So what happens now that algorithms are 0:03:47.120 --> 0:03:50.720 the primary environment that we're swimming in. What happens to 0:03:51.160 --> 0:03:55.520 professional values, what happens to identity? Just think about one 0:03:55.600 --> 0:03:58.560 example of this. One of the brand new words that 0:03:58.600 --> 0:04:01.200 we all witness the birth of a couple decades ago 0:04:01.480 --> 0:04:04.880 was clickbait. As you presumably know, this is one of 0:04:04.920 --> 0:04:09.560 those provocative headlines like you'll never believe what happens next, 0:04:09.760 --> 0:04:12.520 and this gets you to go down some rabbit hole 0:04:12.560 --> 0:04:16.240 that you didn't intend to go down. But now clickbait 0:04:16.560 --> 0:04:21.000 has evolved into Oxford English Dictionaries word of the. 0:04:21.080 --> 0:04:23.960 Year last year, which is rage bait. 0:04:24.480 --> 0:04:28.000 This is the next evolutionary step in the attention economy. 0:04:28.520 --> 0:04:32.640 Rage bait is all about shouting something, some statement that's 0:04:32.680 --> 0:04:38.200 so inflammatory or so absurd that your nervous system lights 0:04:38.279 --> 0:04:42.280 up before your more thoughtful neural networks even get their 0:04:42.320 --> 0:04:46.440 shoes on. So you feel a surge of whatever anger 0:04:46.600 --> 0:04:50.720 or discuss or disbelief, and before you're consciously aware of it, 0:04:50.960 --> 0:04:54.880 your fingers are clicking and you're commenting, you're sharing, you're 0:04:55.200 --> 0:04:58.279 stitching a video, you're firing back at someone in the 0:04:58.440 --> 0:04:59.200 comment section. 0:05:00.120 --> 0:05:01.000 You're all worked up. 0:05:01.240 --> 0:05:05.560 But from the algorithm's point of view, engagement is engagement, 0:05:05.839 --> 0:05:11.000 and in a system that measures success by interaction, provoking 0:05:11.080 --> 0:05:16.000 emotion is a very effective strategy. So I'm fascinated with 0:05:16.040 --> 0:05:18.800 what all this means for us as a society. And 0:05:18.839 --> 0:05:21.040 I knew there was no one better to call for 0:05:21.080 --> 0:05:25.120 this than Onzel. Christen Angel is a sociologist who has 0:05:25.120 --> 0:05:31.760 spent years embedded inside newsrooms, inside influencer culture, inside the 0:05:31.800 --> 0:05:36.920 worlds where algorithms and analytics shape what people produce and 0:05:36.960 --> 0:05:41.600 how they see themselves on shell studies, incentives, and how 0:05:41.680 --> 0:05:46.320 our digital infrastructures are reshaping the social fabric around us. 0:05:46.400 --> 0:05:48.800 So I'm so pleased to sit down with her today 0:05:48.960 --> 0:05:53.560 to talk about what happens when human brains live inside 0:05:53.720 --> 0:06:03.400 algorithmic systems and how those systems are shaping our behavior. So, Angel, 0:06:03.520 --> 0:06:08.760 you study algorithms and their social impact on people, tell 0:06:08.800 --> 0:06:09.360 us about that. 0:06:09.839 --> 0:06:13.640 For the past ten years, I've been looking at how 0:06:13.680 --> 0:06:17.640 algorithmic technologies are playing an increasingly important role in people's 0:06:17.640 --> 0:06:20.000 lives and in their work. So now the thing is, 0:06:20.000 --> 0:06:22.920 I'm a sociologist by training, so I really care about 0:06:23.000 --> 0:06:27.919 people's identities, their work practices, how they communicate and relate 0:06:28.200 --> 0:06:32.160 to others, and all of that has been completely transformed 0:06:32.480 --> 0:06:37.000 with digital technologies and the computational procedure sustaining them. Everything 0:06:37.080 --> 0:06:41.760 we do now is mediated through computational procedures one way 0:06:41.839 --> 0:06:45.400 or another, thanks to mobile devices on the one hand 0:06:45.440 --> 0:06:46.880 and computers on the other. 0:06:47.360 --> 0:06:49.240 So let's take a specific example. 0:06:49.320 --> 0:06:53.479 So you got interested some years ago in how journalists 0:06:53.480 --> 0:06:56.039 were writing their articles and what kind of things they 0:06:56.200 --> 0:07:00.159 chose to write, and how that changed once these with 0:07:00.320 --> 0:07:01.920 the metrics got introduced. 0:07:02.560 --> 0:07:05.440 Yeah, so that was so interesting. At first. 0:07:05.480 --> 0:07:08.240 I came to kind of study journalism because I was, like, 0:07:08.320 --> 0:07:12.600 you know, with the Internet and kind of online advertising, 0:07:12.800 --> 0:07:16.520 the business models of the news are changing right in 0:07:16.560 --> 0:07:20.120 Big Park because online advertising move to social media platforms 0:07:20.200 --> 0:07:23.440 and Google, and so they had news websites had less 0:07:23.440 --> 0:07:25.440 money and newspapers had less money, and so I was 0:07:25.520 --> 0:07:28.120 kind of broadly interested in that and like, what does 0:07:28.160 --> 0:07:30.960 that mean for the future of the news. And I 0:07:31.040 --> 0:07:34.360 did what I always do. I'm an ethnographer, which means 0:07:34.400 --> 0:07:39.000 that I go spend time with people. I interview them, 0:07:39.520 --> 0:07:42.640 I have lunch with them, I observe how they work. 0:07:43.000 --> 0:07:45.440 I become kind of part of the furniture at the office. 0:07:45.480 --> 0:07:47.800 It's like a yeah, she's here again, you know, just 0:07:47.920 --> 0:07:51.280 observing us another day. And what I realized at that 0:07:51.440 --> 0:07:55.240 point is that in the different newsrooms that I was studying, 0:07:55.840 --> 0:07:58.000 some of them were in New York, some of them 0:07:58.000 --> 0:08:03.320 were in Paris, lists kept on looking at these specific 0:08:03.400 --> 0:08:07.360 software programs that they were kind of obsessed with. And 0:08:07.400 --> 0:08:11.080 so what were the software programs? They were web analytics, 0:08:11.080 --> 0:08:16.640 software programs that were providing detailed, real time data about 0:08:16.760 --> 0:08:20.480 what readers were doing on the website. Right, So it 0:08:20.600 --> 0:08:23.320 was giving kind of social media metrics like how many 0:08:23.360 --> 0:08:27.160 readers were coming from Facebook, from Twitter, etc. It was 0:08:27.240 --> 0:08:30.600 telling people how many people had read the articles they 0:08:30.600 --> 0:08:34.600 had published, right, was it ten people, twenty people, one 0:08:34.679 --> 0:08:38.240 hundred thousand, ten hundred thousand, a million, right, So, giving 0:08:38.320 --> 0:08:41.720 that it was ranking all the articles in terms of 0:08:41.760 --> 0:08:45.880 their popularity on the website and on social media, and 0:08:45.920 --> 0:08:50.400 it was also telling journalists how long readers were spending 0:08:50.480 --> 0:08:54.200 on average on any given article, which, by the way, 0:08:54.320 --> 0:08:57.320 is not a good metric in the sense that like 0:08:57.400 --> 0:09:00.480 it's almost always in the range of like six to 0:09:00.480 --> 0:09:04.720 fifteen seconds is the average time that readers spent on 0:09:04.800 --> 0:09:09.600 any news article. Right, Yeah, not fun for journalists, definitely. 0:09:09.640 --> 0:09:12.560 They preferred to ignore that one. And so what I 0:09:12.600 --> 0:09:16.240 realized is that journalists kept on talking about that. So 0:09:16.240 --> 0:09:19.720 that was the early two thousand tents, right. People didn't 0:09:19.760 --> 0:09:23.400 really know. I mean, the internet was still pretty new, right, 0:09:23.480 --> 0:09:27.560 and social media was even newer. But journalists were just like, wow, 0:09:27.720 --> 0:09:32.280 look like that article is so popular. It's just like it's, 0:09:32.320 --> 0:09:35.320 you know, such a hit, everybody's clicking on it. Well 0:09:35.320 --> 0:09:40.120 as this article hmmm, disappointing. I spent two weeks reporting 0:09:40.200 --> 0:09:42.880 this and no one's clicking on it. And so they 0:09:43.000 --> 0:09:46.760 kept on discussing this and making jokes about it, talking 0:09:46.800 --> 0:09:50.640 about it and kind of more and more using this 0:09:50.920 --> 0:09:53.560 data to make sense of what it meant to be 0:09:53.720 --> 0:09:54.800 a good journalist. 0:09:55.640 --> 0:09:56.000 Yeah. 0:09:56.160 --> 0:10:00.040 So first, what was the difference before if you you 0:10:00.120 --> 0:10:03.880 were a newspaper writer, let's say twenty years before that, 0:10:04.040 --> 0:10:05.239 how did you get feedback? 0:10:05.360 --> 0:10:07.400 Yeah, so that's the really interesting thing. 0:10:07.520 --> 0:10:09.720 So what's really fun there, and that's you know, the 0:10:09.760 --> 0:10:12.199 great point of being in academia is that other people 0:10:12.240 --> 0:10:15.440 have studied print newsrooms in the eighties and nineties, right, 0:10:15.480 --> 0:10:18.480 so they have all of these historical material about how 0:10:18.520 --> 0:10:21.760 print newsrooms used to work. Now, the print newsrooms, the 0:10:21.760 --> 0:10:25.960 way it used to work was two characteristics. First, journalists 0:10:26.000 --> 0:10:29.440 and editors did not care much about the audience, right, 0:10:29.840 --> 0:10:33.080 And they didn't care mostly because they thought that what 0:10:33.240 --> 0:10:38.080 mattered more was the opinion of their peers and superiors. 0:10:38.120 --> 0:10:42.240 So there was this kind of strong professional identities that 0:10:42.559 --> 0:10:47.120 what was really important was what other journalists were thinking 0:10:47.160 --> 0:10:51.480 about you, both in new newsroom and in other newsrooms. Right, 0:10:51.520 --> 0:10:54.520 because journalists always tried to move between one newsroom and 0:10:54.600 --> 0:10:54.800 the next. 0:10:54.840 --> 0:10:56.280 So let's say you had the New York Times. 0:10:56.480 --> 0:10:58.720 You also care about what people at the Washington Post 0:10:58.760 --> 0:11:00.640 think about your work, because if they like it, perhaps 0:11:00.640 --> 0:11:03.000 they'll offer your job later on that kind of stuff, 0:11:03.640 --> 0:11:04.680 and then what your. 0:11:04.640 --> 0:11:06.680 Hierarchical superiors total of your work. 0:11:06.720 --> 0:11:09.600 So your editors in chief basically, right, and if your 0:11:09.679 --> 0:11:12.360 editor in chief was saying like, wow, this is a 0:11:12.400 --> 0:11:15.640 great article, well done, that was that you know, that 0:11:15.840 --> 0:11:18.480 was kind of the best things that could happen to 0:11:18.600 --> 0:11:23.000 you on any given day. Now, they were receiving letters 0:11:23.040 --> 0:11:26.360 from the audience, right. So letters to the editor are 0:11:26.400 --> 0:11:29.760 like kind of a long established tradition, most newspapers have them, 0:11:30.320 --> 0:11:34.080 but there are all of these like historical studies showing 0:11:34.160 --> 0:11:37.880 that journalists mostly disregarded these letters and they're like, oh yeah, 0:11:37.880 --> 0:11:40.960 people are crazy, they're understand those crazy stuff. They don't 0:11:41.000 --> 0:11:45.840 understand how journalism works, right, So a very different kind 0:11:45.840 --> 0:11:51.120 of relationship where really what the audience was actually doing 0:11:51.280 --> 0:11:55.640 and what it wanted wasn't very well understood or kind 0:11:55.640 --> 0:11:59.120 of paid attention to. The second aspect, there was also 0:11:59.160 --> 0:12:03.439 that with newspapers there were lots of surveys obviously, because 0:12:03.440 --> 0:12:05.920 you had marketing departments and you had like kind of 0:12:06.000 --> 0:12:09.240 commercial the commercial side of publications, right, and they cared 0:12:09.320 --> 0:12:12.840 about the audience because that's how depending on you know, 0:12:12.920 --> 0:12:16.360 readership figures. That's how they were able to charge for 0:12:17.080 --> 0:12:21.520 more expensive advertising space, right, And so that's what revenues 0:12:21.559 --> 0:12:25.840 depended on. So the marketing departments were doing surveys. But 0:12:25.880 --> 0:12:28.319 what's interesting about these surveys is that you know, in 0:12:28.360 --> 0:12:31.600 the eighteen and nineties, they only asked like, well, do 0:12:31.679 --> 0:12:34.920 you like the newspaper and people would say yeah, But 0:12:35.000 --> 0:12:38.920 they didn't have super granular data about well, which section 0:12:39.080 --> 0:12:41.800 exactly do you read the most People would say like, well, 0:12:41.880 --> 0:12:44.959 based on memory, I tend to read more of the lifestyle. 0:12:45.200 --> 0:12:48.480 Say but you know, I really care about international news too, Right, 0:12:48.559 --> 0:12:51.040 So people they were relying on this kind of post 0:12:51.080 --> 0:12:54.760 hoc memories and recollections of what readers were doing, and 0:12:54.800 --> 0:12:58.760 they didn't really know in detail which articles and which 0:12:58.800 --> 0:13:02.000 topics they cared the most. Now comes the Internet and 0:13:02.080 --> 0:13:04.840 comes web analytics and the kind of software programs and 0:13:04.880 --> 0:13:08.720 algorithms kind of displaying with dashboards what these analytics look 0:13:08.840 --> 0:13:14.000 like to journalists and editors. Suddenly they realize that no 0:13:14.040 --> 0:13:19.280 one's clicking on international news. Very few people click on 0:13:19.480 --> 0:13:24.160 political news unless it involves some kind of scandal or 0:13:24.240 --> 0:13:28.760 sex or celebrities. Right, that people care a lot about 0:13:29.080 --> 0:13:33.319 lifestyle news. They have a lot about celebrity news. They 0:13:33.360 --> 0:13:36.440 care not at all about culture and the arts. That's 0:13:36.559 --> 0:13:39.560 not really what people click on, right, And so suddenly 0:13:39.760 --> 0:13:43.520 they have this kind of like almost tsunami of data 0:13:43.679 --> 0:13:46.360 telling them what people are actually clicking on. 0:13:46.679 --> 0:13:49.360 And that's kind of a cognitive. 0:13:48.880 --> 0:13:52.600 Revolution for journalists, right, because suddenly they're just like, wait, 0:13:52.800 --> 0:13:55.880 what should we do? Should we only do tabloid news 0:13:56.320 --> 0:13:57.760 because that's what readers want? 0:13:58.760 --> 0:14:00.320 Or is our jobs something else? 0:14:01.080 --> 0:14:05.640 And you know, it's interesting because from a behavioral economics perspective, 0:14:06.040 --> 0:14:09.440 even if you ask readers in a very granular fashion 0:14:09.559 --> 0:14:12.000 what they wanted and so on, they don't necessarily know that. 0:14:12.080 --> 0:14:14.400 Consciously they might think I'm the kind of person who 0:14:14.400 --> 0:14:17.640 clicks on international news, even though they don't. Okay, So 0:14:17.679 --> 0:14:21.040 there's this notion of algorithmic capture, which is that let's 0:14:21.040 --> 0:14:24.080 say you're a writer, you start chasing the numbers and 0:14:24.120 --> 0:14:27.680 you end up doing what the algorithm wants. Now, one 0:14:27.800 --> 0:14:32.680 might say, okay, but maybe there was something like editorial capture. 0:14:32.520 --> 0:14:34.960 The editor who's seen or to you, who really admired 0:14:35.000 --> 0:14:36.880 you end up doing what he or she wanted. 0:14:37.400 --> 0:14:39.400 The problem is that the algorithm is. 0:14:39.280 --> 0:14:43.239 More opaque, right, and it changes, it's fungible. 0:14:43.680 --> 0:14:44.760 So tell us how you see that? 0:14:44.920 --> 0:14:48.520 Yeah, So that's fascinating because that's exactly what I observed 0:14:48.520 --> 0:14:51.640 in newsrooms, and that's what my book Metrics at Work 0:14:52.000 --> 0:14:55.920 Journalism is a contested meaning of algorithms is basically all 0:14:55.960 --> 0:14:59.320 about right. So what I find kind of due to 0:14:59.480 --> 0:15:02.640 that kind of again that wave of granular data that 0:15:02.760 --> 0:15:05.560 kind of enter newsrooms, and you know often it entered 0:15:05.560 --> 0:15:09.440 newsrooms with the best intentions, right, which was that editors, 0:15:10.200 --> 0:15:13.720 journalists and the companies that were that were usually for 0:15:13.840 --> 0:15:17.280 profit companies that were providing these kind of dashboards and 0:15:17.360 --> 0:15:22.040 software programs. We're like, listen, it's a question of democratization. 0:15:22.680 --> 0:15:26.280 We want to give journalists the knowledge of what like 0:15:26.400 --> 0:15:30.560 their audiences are actually engaging with so that they can 0:15:30.640 --> 0:15:33.240 survive in the digital age, right, so that they can 0:15:33.320 --> 0:15:36.240 drive in the digital age. So that was the impulse, 0:15:36.280 --> 0:15:39.520 a good one, right. But then what you see is 0:15:39.520 --> 0:15:43.320 that once that data is available, you get exactly the 0:15:43.400 --> 0:15:46.720 kind of algorithm captures that you find, right, And there 0:15:46.760 --> 0:15:47.080 is this. 0:15:47.200 --> 0:15:49.000 Like push towards clickbait. 0:15:49.800 --> 0:15:52.800 It's just like it's and it happens at many different 0:15:52.880 --> 0:15:58.320 levels individually it happens because journalists, like all communicators, and 0:15:58.320 --> 0:16:01.520 I include academics in that, they want to be read. 0:16:01.960 --> 0:16:04.040 What's the point of being a journalist if no one 0:16:04.120 --> 0:16:06.280 reads your stuff, you know what I mean? That's kind 0:16:06.280 --> 0:16:09.000 of an existential question. And so to me, it makes 0:16:09.040 --> 0:16:11.040 perfect sense that you would be like, well, I'm going 0:16:11.120 --> 0:16:14.040 to do everything in my power so that you know, 0:16:14.240 --> 0:16:17.920 my articles find the audience, right, and if that means 0:16:17.960 --> 0:16:21.320 putting a slightly more clickbaita title, so be it. 0:16:21.840 --> 0:16:24.920 And clickbaity is things like here's one weird thing you 0:16:24.960 --> 0:16:26.440 can do, and so what else. 0:16:26.280 --> 0:16:27.040 Do you see? 0:16:27.240 --> 0:16:29.280 Yeah, so at the time, Okay, so that's going to 0:16:29.320 --> 0:16:31.760 be a bit dated now because again this was you know, 0:16:31.840 --> 0:16:34.320 the bright days of the early twenty tents, right, but 0:16:34.400 --> 0:16:37.680 the big things where yeah, this one wheel trick you know, 0:16:38.240 --> 0:16:44.800 you'll never believe. You know, what happened next was shocking listicles. 0:16:44.960 --> 0:16:48.480 We're a big thing, right, like the ten best restaurants 0:16:48.520 --> 0:16:53.880 in San Francisco, you know kind of stuff. Slide shows too, right, 0:16:54.040 --> 0:16:58.200 because at the time, a lot of newsrooms were still 0:16:58.240 --> 0:17:01.280 counting page views, and so a slide show with ten 0:17:01.520 --> 0:17:04.600 pages counted as ten phage views. I know, it's really 0:17:04.680 --> 0:17:07.800 kind of a cheap trick, so kind of things like that, right, 0:17:07.840 --> 0:17:12.040 And you could see these formats becoming widely popular across 0:17:12.119 --> 0:17:16.480 newsrooms because newsrooms are also all watching each other and 0:17:16.560 --> 0:17:19.679 seeing especially at the time, it was Busfeed and the 0:17:19.760 --> 0:17:23.399 Huffington posts using these kind of more clickbaity tactics and 0:17:23.440 --> 0:17:25.840 getting the traffic numbers that were coming with from it, 0:17:26.440 --> 0:17:29.840 especially on Facebook and Twitter, and everybody was like, oh, okay, 0:17:29.960 --> 0:17:32.800 we've got to do this, right, So then a couple 0:17:32.800 --> 0:17:35.280 of things kind of happen. So first one, which is 0:17:35.359 --> 0:17:39.080 exactly what you said, is that you know, social media 0:17:39.160 --> 0:17:44.600 traffic and social media algorithms are fiical. They have gotten 0:17:44.720 --> 0:17:49.680 only morephical since, right, But they're opaque, so no one 0:17:49.760 --> 0:17:53.359 really understands what's getting recommended. And you know, platforms have 0:17:53.480 --> 0:17:56.920 given some modicum of information, but they also don't want 0:17:57.000 --> 0:18:00.119 users to gain the system, so they're not given that 0:18:00.240 --> 0:18:01.320 much information. 0:18:01.560 --> 0:18:01.720 Right. 0:18:02.320 --> 0:18:07.000 Then, social media platforms also made sudden changes over the 0:18:07.119 --> 0:18:12.320 years that really hurt newsrooms. For example, Facebook, at some 0:18:12.440 --> 0:18:16.119 point in the mid twenty tens decided that it was 0:18:16.160 --> 0:18:22.200 going to stop prioritizing posts and articles from news organizations 0:18:22.240 --> 0:18:28.280 and instead promote relatively more organic content, namely content coming 0:18:28.280 --> 0:18:32.240 from individuals, and that's where influencers started driving. 0:18:32.280 --> 0:18:33.840 But that's for a bit later. 0:18:34.040 --> 0:18:36.399 But so from one day to the next, basically you 0:18:36.480 --> 0:18:39.720 had like all news websites because traffic was like that, 0:18:40.119 --> 0:18:43.439 just like going way kind of further down, just because 0:18:43.480 --> 0:18:47.000 in one change in the Facebook algorithm that cut traffic 0:18:47.080 --> 0:18:50.160 can of in half for many newsrooms. Right, So it's 0:18:50.200 --> 0:18:53.600 fickle and things are changing, and what works well as 0:18:53.600 --> 0:18:57.119 a recipe for traffic at one point stops working, and 0:18:57.160 --> 0:18:59.280 everybody's kind of in the dark and trying to figure 0:18:59.280 --> 0:19:02.040 out what happens. So that's kind of the first problem. 0:19:02.440 --> 0:19:05.440 The second problem is that, you know, journalists, we're also 0:19:05.480 --> 0:19:11.160 thinking really hard about wait, like, if we follow what 0:19:11.240 --> 0:19:16.840 the algorithms want, we're only going to do tablauid news right, 0:19:17.320 --> 0:19:21.520 namely against sex, kndle celebrities that like, you know, it 0:19:21.640 --> 0:19:23.920 always people are always going to click more on that, 0:19:24.080 --> 0:19:27.480 you know, but this is not what our role is. 0:19:27.680 --> 0:19:30.320 At the end of the day. We became journalists because 0:19:30.359 --> 0:19:30.960 we care. 0:19:30.840 --> 0:19:37.919 About democracy, holding the state and the powerful accountable, about 0:19:38.000 --> 0:19:42.959 covering kind of longer stories, more complex stories, right, And 0:19:43.000 --> 0:19:46.120 so what I kind of observed during kind of all 0:19:46.160 --> 0:19:50.080 the time I spent in newsrooms is that basically journalists 0:19:50.119 --> 0:19:55.440 were torn between these different definitions of what their professional 0:19:55.480 --> 0:19:58.400 identity was about. On the one hand, they were like, well, 0:19:58.440 --> 0:20:01.920 we're professional communicating, so we want our stuff to be read, 0:20:02.280 --> 0:20:05.119 and so if clickbait has to happen, we will do 0:20:05.240 --> 0:20:08.680 it because it's important we want to reach our audience. 0:20:08.840 --> 0:20:11.159 But on the other hand, they were also saying, well, 0:20:11.840 --> 0:20:16.360 we care about sharing important things that will make our 0:20:16.440 --> 0:20:20.920 readers more enlightened citizens of the world. And so they 0:20:20.920 --> 0:20:24.280 were kind of always torn between these two kind of 0:20:24.320 --> 0:20:27.760 definitions and kind of moving back and forth. And what 0:20:27.920 --> 0:20:31.800 was fascinating that they would often do like funny little 0:20:31.840 --> 0:20:36.119 accounting things where they would do like, Okay, so I 0:20:36.200 --> 0:20:39.679 really want to write this article about say, you know 0:20:39.680 --> 0:20:43.520 again international news Ukraine, let's say, right, because I really 0:20:43.560 --> 0:20:46.199 think it's important and I think our readers need to 0:20:46.240 --> 0:20:48.679 know about this. But I know that people are not 0:20:48.720 --> 0:20:51.320 going to click a lot right, So to make up 0:20:51.400 --> 0:20:54.760 for it, I'm also going to write an article on't 0:20:54.800 --> 0:20:58.800 say Rhianna right, and that's going to boost my traffic numbers, 0:20:59.000 --> 0:21:03.160 And that way I've kind of subsidized my Ukraine article 0:21:03.400 --> 0:21:06.639 with the Rhanna article in terms of traffic, So they 0:21:06.640 --> 0:21:10.280 would do like all of these little deals with themselves 0:21:10.640 --> 0:21:27.440 to try to optimize both sets of kind of constraints. 0:21:29.080 --> 0:21:32.359 What was the equivalent of clickbait back in the day 0:21:32.560 --> 0:21:36.239 of newspapers, because there was what's called yellow journalism. I mean, 0:21:36.280 --> 0:21:38.080 there must have been ways that people are trying to 0:21:38.080 --> 0:21:40.280 get readers, and of course there were tabloid presses. 0:21:40.440 --> 0:21:43.800 Yeah, absolutely, so there were many equivalents, and so that's 0:21:43.800 --> 0:21:48.480 the same clickbait has always existed in many ways. So 0:21:48.600 --> 0:21:51.520 at the time, let's see, there was a lot of 0:21:52.760 --> 0:21:56.960 kind of as you say, yellow journalism, so extremely outrageous, 0:21:57.240 --> 0:22:03.120 like inflammatory, kind of aggressive headlines, you know, really kind 0:22:03.119 --> 0:22:09.280 of emphasizing kind of hatred right or like kind of xenophobia, bigotry, 0:22:09.520 --> 0:22:11.560 like you know, things like that have always existed in 0:22:11.600 --> 0:22:14.760 many newspapers over the past two centuries have really indulged 0:22:14.760 --> 0:22:18.320 in that because again it's like stokes kind of patriotic 0:22:18.440 --> 0:22:21.119 sentiments for example, and people are like, yeah, like you know, 0:22:21.520 --> 0:22:25.919 I'm gonna buy this newspaper. So that's kind of one aspect. Definitely, 0:22:25.960 --> 0:22:29.840 coverage of stars and celebrities, for example, at the time 0:22:30.000 --> 0:22:33.439 Sarah Bernhardt, you know, in the late nineteenth century was 0:22:33.480 --> 0:22:38.720 like the idol. All kind of teenage women were doing clippings, 0:22:38.920 --> 0:22:43.359 newspaper clippings of the actress Sarah Bernhart, that was the thing, 0:22:43.400 --> 0:22:46.640 and so newspapers would always put lots of pictures of her, 0:22:47.080 --> 0:22:49.320 so that like the news that teenage girls would do 0:22:49.359 --> 0:22:51.760 the clippings, you know, so they would force their parents 0:22:51.800 --> 0:22:54.439 to buy the newspapers so that they could do that. 0:22:55.359 --> 0:23:00.359 Same with lifestyle and kind of beauty advice, same things. 0:23:00.359 --> 0:23:04.440 That's always been very popular, cooking recipes, things like that, 0:23:04.600 --> 0:23:06.920 you know what I mean. So it's not new, it's 0:23:07.040 --> 0:23:10.760 just the shape it takes and the specific tricks that 0:23:11.000 --> 0:23:14.640 people use to capture the attention changes with the medium, 0:23:15.040 --> 0:23:18.879 you know what I mean, from print to broadcast to digital. 0:23:19.280 --> 0:23:23.800 But again I think it's a change in degree, not 0:23:23.840 --> 0:23:25.800 really a changing kind, if that makes sense. 0:23:26.000 --> 0:23:28.000 So when you published your book in twenty twenty, you 0:23:28.080 --> 0:23:30.600 were interested in this issue about clickbait and how people 0:23:30.600 --> 0:23:35.120 are getting sucked into this whirlpool of that. Now we're 0:23:35.119 --> 0:23:39.200 in twenty twenty six. So last year Oxford English Dictionary's 0:23:39.280 --> 0:23:42.720 word of the Year was rage bait, which is close 0:23:42.760 --> 0:23:45.040 cousins to clickbait tell us about rage bait. 0:23:45.760 --> 0:23:49.199 So rage bait I think of as a kind of 0:23:49.359 --> 0:23:52.600 like vengeful cousin of clickbait. 0:23:52.680 --> 0:23:54.520 Right, well, clickbait was. 0:23:54.520 --> 0:23:58.439 Still kind of light. You will never believe what happens next. 0:23:58.720 --> 0:24:05.080 You will be shocked ten weird tricks to whatever do something, 0:24:05.240 --> 0:24:10.119 you know. Rage bait is more about provoking you into 0:24:10.320 --> 0:24:14.560 kind of negative, kind of arousal, right, negative emotions such 0:24:14.640 --> 0:24:21.440 as anger, fear, hatred, again, not things that are radically new, 0:24:21.560 --> 0:24:25.160 but really kind of pushing on that. The typical example 0:24:25.200 --> 0:24:28.280 of rage bait is going to be an influencer or 0:24:28.280 --> 0:24:34.800 someone on the internet just stating something outrageous, right, or 0:24:34.920 --> 0:24:39.919 doing something outrageous but with complete confidence and innocence and 0:24:39.960 --> 0:24:41.120 not seeming. 0:24:40.760 --> 0:24:41.800 To see the problem. 0:24:42.200 --> 0:24:44.919 Right. So there are a number of examples of that. 0:24:44.960 --> 0:24:46.800 I mean, one of the ones that I like are 0:24:46.840 --> 0:24:52.639 like these weird cooking videos, but where they cook things like, 0:24:52.720 --> 0:24:55.879 for example, like in the bathroom using. 0:24:55.640 --> 0:24:58.159 The baths stub and doing like this is really. 0:24:57.920 --> 0:25:00.720