Leo XIV Names Clickbait the Enemy of Real Communication

His Holiness has not only addressed AI, but now, he and the Dicastery for Communication are taking on clickbait! Some of the biggest offenders are Catholic YouTubers.

From Aleteia

By Daniel Esparza

For World Communications Day 2027, the Pope chose “A New Gaze: Paying Attention in the Age of Clickbait,” a direct challenge to the infrastructure that monetizes human attention.

On September 29 — the feast of St. Gabriel the Archangel (in the New Calendar, March 24 traditionally), patron of communications — the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communication announced the theme for the 61st World Communications Day, to be celebrated on May 9, 2027: “A New Gaze: Paying Attention in the Age of Clickbait.” The full papal message will be released on January 24, the feast of St. Francis de Sales, patron saint of journalists.

The choice reflects a concern that has run through Leo XIV’s pontificate from the beginning: that the infrastructure of contemporary communication is reshaping not just what people know, but how they think, and how they relate to one another. As the Dicastery explained in its announcement, “the attention economy, with its struggle for a few moments of interest amid the rapid and endless flow of content, is transforming not only our cognitive abilities but also the depth of our interpersonal communication.”

What the attention economy actually is

The term was coined by the psychologist and Nobel laureate Herbert Simon in 1971, developed by the economist Michael Goldhaber in the 1990s, and popularized by Tim Wu’s 2016 book The Attention Merchants. The basic observation is simple: in a world of information abundance, the scarce resource is no longer content but human attention. Media platforms — social networks, streaming services, news aggregators — compete for that attention, measure it, and sell it to advertisers. The business model requires maximizing the time users spend on the platform, which means maximizing engagement, which means systematically favoring content that provokes strong emotional reactions: outrage, fear, desire, schadenfreude. The incentive structure produces this regardless of anyone’s intentions.

The consequences are well documented. A September 2026 Pew Research Center survey found that 53% of American adults feel they spend too much time on their smartphones — and that among those who tried to cut back, only a quarter succeeded. A 2024 MIT study found that regular use of AI writing tools produces measurable “cognitive debt” — a reduction in the brain’s capacity for independent reasoning and sustained attention. Research on social media use documents its tendency to produce “epistemic cocooning”: the gradual narrowing of a person’s information environment to content that confirms existing beliefs and triggers reliable emotional responses.

What the Dicastery said

The announcement framed the problem both theologically and technically. The Latin root of the word “attention” — ad-tendere, to stretch toward — reveals what attention actually is: a form of generosity, a reaching out toward another. “Communicating is not about capturing attention, nor about selling it, but about safeguarding it as a precious resource for relationships.” The call of the theme is spiritual, and thus practical: “We are called to a conversion of our gaze: to look again, with attention and with love.”

This connects directly to Leo XIV's message for the 60th World Communications Day — released in January 2026 — in which he warned against algorithms that “reward rapid emotions and penalize human expressions that require more time, such as the effort to understand and reflection,” closing communities “into bubbles of easy consensus and easy indignation” and fueling social polarization. That message placed face and voice at the center of authentic communication — both given by God, who created us in his image and called us to life with his Word. The risk the Pope identified: the attention economy leads us to build “a world of mirrors, where everything is made ‘in our image and likeness,’” depriving us of genuine encounter with the other.

Why this matters beyond media policy

The attention economy shapes how children learn, how adults form opinions, how communities build or fracture consensus, how prayer competes with the scroll for the first minutes of the morning, and how human relationships — which require sustained, patient, non-monetized attention — survive in an environment optimized to prevent exactly that.

As Leo noted at his September 23 general audience, commenting on Gaudium et Spes, the genuine progress of human civilization requires that technology serve the integral good of the person. The attention economy, at its current scale and design, is a system built to extract value from human cognitive life rather than to serve it. Naming it on the feast of the archangel associated with divine communication is a characteristically precise gesture.

The full papal message arrives January 24.