You’ll never believe what this Chrome extension does. It can identify clickbait on Facebook and save you from reading through a long, ad-laced list of outdated and/old/incorrect information. The extension is called This is Clickbait and it’s available in the Chrome Web Store. It does two things; identify links shared on Facebook as clickbait or not clickbait, and for the slightly ambiguous links, it offers a clickbait score. Here’s how it works.
Install This is Clickbait and start going through your Facebook feed. When you see a link in your newfeed, it will be accompanied by a little tag that tells you whether or not it is clickbait.
If the link shared is indeed clickbait, the tag will read ‘This is clickbait’. If the extension isn’t sure, it will give the link a score on how likely it is to be clickbait. Take the screenshot below as an example; the link shared has a 85.26% chance of being clickbait.
Links that are safe have a green badge that says ‘Not a clickbait’. There are helpful little emoji characters on the badge should you not understand English.
This is Clickbait is accurate most of the time. It analyses the title of the link shared to judge if it’s clickbait or not. For the most part, it gets it right. On occasion, the extension will get it wrong particularly when dealing with a link to a list post e.g. our list of the best iOS apps and tips of 2016.
The extension doesn’t just look at the title though. If it did, it’s likely everything the Cracked Facebook page shared would be marked as clickbait simply because it’s a list post. The extension gives most things that Cracked posts a pass as not being clickbait. For the most part, This is Clickbait is on point. You can use it to identify clickbait on Facebook and save yourself time.