Celebrities and other leftists are excited to unleash the awesome electoral power of #Resist during the midterm elections in November. The catch is, they must actually mobilize people to vote - and if they can’t do it by getting arrested, lying, calling their adversaries “racist,” or actually inspiring civic duty in people (too much trouble nowadays), they must resort to other methods. Kelly Wynne of Newsweek reported on Oct. 16 that clickbait might be the latest shenanigan.
This isn’t the kind of clickbait that dresses up voting to make it sexy - it’s the sort of dishonest clickbait that whisks you to a completely undesired location, much like a rickroll. Activist actress Kathy Griffin was among the first to hop on the trend, promising readers of her Oct. 12 tweet salacious details of a Trump voicemail if they clicked on a link - which promptly redirected to vote.gov, an official US government website for voter registration:
I've decided to release the voicemail Trump left for me the day the infamous photo was released. It took me some time to decide to do this, but I feel its important to share it with the world.
— Kathy Griffin (@kathygriffin) October 13, 2018
Click Here To Listen: https://t.co/V4q6UI24nn
Another Twitter user calling himself Tim posted early this week, “Wow, I can’t believe this is why Ariana Grande and Pete Davidson split up” and embedded the same link. According to Newsweek that post has been retweeted upwards of 20,000 times and the link followed upwards of 1,000,000 times. The tweet seems to be getting the attention it might have gotten if the singer and comedian had actually ended their relationship over a voter registration dispute.
The ruse drew the ire of some on Twitter, including one who pointed out “the admittedly long odds that my account is followed by intellectually curious and politically aware young people”:
Here is some misleading text intended as clickbait, in pursuit of the admittedly long odds that my account is followed by intellectually curious and politically aware young people who are somehow not yet registered to votehttps://t.co/a7QfIxLw5h
— Dreamweasel (@Dreamweasel) October 16, 2018
If the left is relying on gossip-besotted youngsters to usher in their political revolution, then they may, to quote Mitch McConnell, “regret this sooner than [they] think.”
