Wednesday, April 5, 2017

Lying clickbait: Same old tricks

Purveyors of lying clickbait like Taboola and Revcontent haven’t given up their deceptive practices.
What follows are some recent examples.

Taboola recently posted a sponsored article titled “Upcoming 2017 movies you can’t miss.” One of those big movies is “The Mummy” starring Tom Cruise. Unfortunately, the Taboola clickbait used a photo of Patricia Velasquez from the 1999 movie of the same name.
Maybe they grabbed the wrong photo. More likely they wanted to pique people's interests with a picture of a smoking-hot babe.



Another Taboola article titled “These Woodstock photos are pretty unnerving” used a photo from 2015, not 1969. The picture is of models Kendall Jenner and Hailey Baldwin at the Coachella music festival.



Revcontent loves to post articles about dead celebrities using photos of living celebrities. Here are two recent examples featuring Kirstie Alley and “Brady Bunch” star Maureen McCormick.


A clickbait article on Yahoo titled “Tiger Woods’ex-wife finally broke her silence” used photos of Woods and ex-girlfriend Lindsey Vonn, not his ex-wife Elin Nordegren.That's either sloppy or they're taking advantage of the curiosity gap.


Finally, another Yahoo sponsored clickbait article titled “This child star went from dorky to supermodel” used a photo of singer, songwriter and Instagram model Jean Watts. She was never a child star.



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