Hyperbolic Clickbait

Saturday, December 13, 2025

I get it all the time – usually about sports – a prompt, notification or alert about a story so astonishing that you just have to click.  And when you get there, the claims that lead you there are quite hyperbolic if not outright lies.  The internet and its primary expression, social media, are rendering shorter and shorter attention spans, making it harder and harder to attract attention and attracting attention is how you make money there.  It is therefore natural, especially when soulless and ethically devoid AI is writing the material, that hyperbole to the point of lying would become increasingly common.  But it is also highly unfortunate.

On the one hand, very important stories get dismissed as hyperbolic clickbait.  Example – Ilan Omar marrying her brother for immigration purposes.  I have ignored the story for years assuming it to be right-wing nutter fodder.  Looks like I am wrong – it’s the real thing.

On the other hand, many people buy into the nonsense, Example:

Former Vice President Kamala Harris thanked her supporters for “standing up for our democracy” and the “rule of law” on Friday at the Democratic National Committee’s (DNC) annual winter meeting in Los Angeles….

“People then come up to me in various places and when they thank me, they are thanking you for standing up for our democracy, for the rule of law, for values and principles, for community, for the breadth and depth of who we are with all of our beautiful differences as a nation,” she said during her remarks.

What utter drivel – almost to the point of being oxymoronic.  “Democracy” at stake in an election?  The most direct expression of a democratic state possible?!  Really?  If that is not hyperbole, I do not know what is.  Most of us signal the use of hyperbole with tone and that is relatively easy to do with the spoken word.  But on the internet, mostly written, it’s really hard to do.  Further most lack the reading skills to distinguish tone even when well written.  And so a lot of people think “democracy” really was at stake in the last election.

And so our political divides get wider and wider.  Google AI says this:

“A republic, if you can keep it” is a famous quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin, said as he left the Constitutional Convention in 1787, responding to a woman asking what kind of government the founders created. It signifies that a republican government relies on the vigilance, virtue, and active participation of its citizens to remain stable, as it’s not inherently self-sustaining and requires effort to prevent decay into other forms, like monarchy or tyranny. The quote emphasizes the shared responsibility of Americans to uphold the principles of the Constitution, ensuring checks and balances, civic education, and civil discourse.

Every now and then, AI gets something right and it did here.  The American Civil War was immensely deadly because the technology outstripped the tactics.  WW I was a stalemate for similar reasons.  Sometimes technology is as much threat as blessing, even in our own hands.  Last week we looked at the sorry state of education in this nation and placed much of the blame on the “digitization” of the classroom.  And so we find the computer a threat to the typical solution we would use to this problem.

But then sometimes social media is just plain old ugly and mean.

It’s a short stack this week:

There is the nanny state and then there is California.  Fascinatingly, this is only an issue if medicine is socialized as what you eat is only the state’s business if the state is paying for your healthcare.  But then who knows if the science is right?

Most science fictions stories are warning tales, not pointers.  And yet.  Has no one seen the Terminator movies?