Clickbait Researchers Make Amazing Discovery... and You Won't Believe what Happened Next

Toronto, ON 2026-05-06—Researchers from the University of Toronto have made an amazing discovery about clickbait, and it will blow your mind.

We all know clickbait when we see it. A breathless headline, an intriguing graphic, and promises of incredible revelations. Dr. Louise Porter, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, has been studying clickbait for 7 years, along with a group of doctoral students, and has just published a paper entitled "Clickbait: The 4 Ways it Changes your Brain (and You Won't Believe #3!)"

Totally True News attempted to read the paper, but after clicking through 13 advertising-laden screens, we still hadn't come to the first way that clickbait changes your brain, so we decided to interview Dr. Porter herself.

"Hello! Yes! I've spent 7 years looking at clickbait," said Porter, "and the results are astounding. After all this work, we finally came to our grand conclusion!"

When asked what exactly that conclusion was, Porter said "Hang on, first things first. Before we get to that, let me fill you in on some background statistics we gathered. We looked at 9000 people who watched a video entitled 'Tiny Kitten Bullies Husky... And What Happened Next Is Crazy'. Well, after a detailed questionnaire, we determined that only 6.3% of people actually thought that what happened next was crazy. Isn't that crazy??"

Porter reports that the most extreme statistic came from a video entitled "Mama Lion Picks Up her Cubs, and What She Did Next will Melt your Heart." Porter said "For that video, we found an astounding 100% of people said that their hearts had not in fact melted. Now, that could be a self-selecting group because it's entirely possible that those whose hearts had melted may not have been in a position to answer the survey."

Totally True News attempted to steer the conversation back to the paper and the amazing conclusion, but Porter had to terminate the interview because someone had posted a video called "Crocodile Tenderly Rescues a Rabbit: Totally Not a Rickroll" and she just had to go and watch it.