Pass it on
There was a time, dimly remembered if at all, when a headline was a summary. It told you what the article contained so you could decide whether to read it. Then someone discovered that a headline could also be a weapon.
The headline stopped summarizing. It started provoking. Specifically, a weapon aimed at the part of your brain that feels an emotion before it can name it. The amygdala fires. The prefrontal cortex; the part that evaluates, contextualizes, checks against memory; lags behind by about half a second. In that half-second gap, you have already formed an opinion, felt an outrage, shared a post. The article; once the point of the enterprise; became an afterthought, a CYA paragraph buried beneath the fold that technically contained the facts the headline had stretched past recognition.
Studies consistently show that a majority of social media shares are made without the sharer having read the article. The headline was enough. The headline was designed to be enough. And why would it not be? The headline is what appears in the feed. The headline is what gets the click. The article is what you scroll past on your way to the comments section. The economics of this are brutal and clear: the headline is the product. The article is the legal disclaimer.
You shared the headline. You felt something because of the headline. You did not read the article. The headline did not need you to. It had already done its job; which was never to inform you, but to activate you. Information is slow, nuanced, and rarely shareable in a single sentence. Activation is fast, simple, and spreads like fire. The marketplace chose activation. The marketplace always does.