Get free money and sex for watching Game of Thrones!

Nowadays, I use YouTube as a TV channel. Gone are the days of simply watching music and cat videos. I have now expanded my viewing habits to top ten videos, fail compilations and dank memes. One channel I watch whenever it is updated, is Chris Broad’s ‘Abroad in Japan’. I find him to be informative and engaging, sometimes even funny. His recent post was him being awoken by sirens at around 6am, only to try to go back to sleep to be roused again by emergency text messages, then again later by his TV turning itself on with an emergency broadcast. This is in relation to the recent North Korean missile flying over Japan.

As ever, he teaches us things without overtly telling us them, in this case, despite the warnings, in Japan, it was business as usual, his main concern being lack of sleep. It was worrying about the actions of another country, but not the kind of hyperbolic reaction you would get here. I can only imagine how hard the internet would break if a missile flew over the UK, being flooded all at once by poorly spelled threats against entire races of people, calls for them to be banned from here and killed and then banned again. Cretins have access to the internet now; boy, oh boy do we know it.

Then a day later, one of the sites that panders to these dreary dullards pops up on my Facebook feed, shared by someone I vaguely know. Unilad, a post Buzzfeed piece of dross that I despise from the name alone, let alone the piss poor level of ‘journalism’ contained within. It isn’t uncommon, each to their own I guess, but what caught my eye was a picture of Chris Broad under the headline “Watch as British man films North Korean missiles flying overhead”. At no point in his video did that happen, it was just a grumpily wry look at how Japan’s emergency broadcast system works followed by a rant about ‘wankers’ that fund North Korea through tourism. Anyway, it sparked off an old bug bear of mine about clickbait.

Unrelated image. Nothing to see here.

There is a certain element of clickbait I am fine with. Writing multiple articles on subjects that are currently popular is fine, expected even. Occasionally those articles with even hold a little fresh insight on a subject you are already familiar with (hence the inclusion of Game of Thrones in my clickbait worthy title. It is deliberately ironic, just pointing that out for the cheap seats). I’m even fine with the listicle format, with one caveat; if you are going to use an arbitrary number instead of a top ten, make sure you have enough points to fill said arbitrary number. It does aggrieve me when I see a couple of ‘filler’ points when someone has claimed ‘Top 13 things you didn’t know about (insert tv/game/film of the hour)!’ Just have a top 11, apparently there are no longer any rules…

 

Illuminati confirmed!

 

I’m getting off point. The really insidious ones are the articles that have a headline with either no relation to the points, or in many cases, that completely contradict the text contain within. A recent example was an often shared piece titled ‘Vaping proven to be more harmful than smoking!’ Reading the piece itself showed nothing of the sort, only that vaping could cause popcorn lung, a serious condition no doubt, but far less serious than cancer. The same article goes on to explain the extremely unscientific methods used to come to their hypothesis, rendering much of it speculation. Most people I have seen sharing this haven’t read the piece itself. They smugly cite the headline as ‘proof’ of what they had been saying all along. ‘Get some better friends!’ I hear a voice telling me, hey, I can disagree with people without the need to stop being friendly.

Apparently people like shoes. Here is a shoe.

It is an example of the tl;dr type scenario that is all too common these days. People can’t be arsed with facts or research, they simply want soundbites. Unverified tweets by people unqualified to be commenting on certain issues. Memes. This is how a lot of people now obtain their information and they are being pandered to mercilessly. This is why we are living in a world where a sexist, racist and incompetent buffoon is in one of the highest positions of authority on earth. It is worrying and as I mentioned in my censorship piece, there are steps to try and regulate the internet, which I am sure that most people are against, but in situations where internet ‘journalists’ are completely free to mislead people, with no scruples whatsoever, there surely is a case for some form of regulation. Or, people who write online should have some integrity to prevent it from happening in the first place. Shit in one hand, wish in the other, see which one fills up first.

 

I’m signing off for today. I have a few bookmarked articles to read on the leak of GTA6, Half Life 3 confirmed and how the Illuminati puts chem-trails in broadcasts of X Factor.