Want to try this right away? Install it from the Chrome Web Store! (Special thanks to Saurabh Mathur)
Clickbait: content whose main purpose is to attract attention and encourage visitors to click on a link to a particular web page.
People continually fall for clickbait. Why? As Wired mentioned in its article on the psychology of clickbait: "Whether you think clickbait is on the rise, obscurant and self-negating, not such a big deal, or the root of all evil, one thing is clear about it: It's increasingly hard to pin down."
A lot of editors use clickbait in an effort to manipulate you or grab your attention. The difference with clickbait is you're often aware of this manipulation, and yet helpless to resist it. It's at once obvious in its bait-iness, and somehow still effective bait.
But with this small Chrome extension utilizing deep learning, one can easily identify whether an article on Facebook is clickbait or not.
Because I think that's where the majority of clickbait articles are posted, and if you can see that the article is clickbait from within Facebook itself, then the problem is solved.
Option 1: From the Chrome Web Store
Option 2: From source
- Clone this repo so you have a copy in a folder locally
- Open
chrome://extensionsin the location or go toTools>Extensions - Enable
Developer modeby checking the checkbox in the upper-right corner - Click on the button labelled
Load unpacked extension... - Select the directory where you cloned this repo
- Visit Facebook!