Forbes articles written by contributors are basically clickbait

publish Backlink: Musings on everything else

The issue

Forbes articles seem legit because Forbes seems legit. Everyone’s heard of Forbes 30 Under 30 and that’s an Important Thing so therefore Forbes, the publisher of an Important Thing, must surely also publish largely legitimate content?

Yeah, no, sometimes? Just take Forbes with a heaping portion of salt if you see this anywhere:

Link to the article in question

I don’t even need to explain what “contributor” means because one has already described himself):

Contributors at Forbes are unpaid writers, domain experts with day jobs, as opposed to staff writers who are full time employees of Forbes.

(… not one sentence later …)

It has been rewarding for both my personal brand and my digital marketing agency, MWI.

So, basically, they’re pro bono writers. And I deduce thusly:

• At best, contributors are:
  • Angling for a job at Forbes by writing thoughtful material for their future employer.
  • Intelligent activists with a vested interest in raising awareness of their cause (though even in this case, their articles will not be objective).
• At worst, and I have to imagine in most cases, contributors are:
  • Opportunists like Jack Kelly and Josh Steimle who use Forbes’ name brand to draw readers to their own personal brand. Catchier headlines means more readers.

The result

Clickbait.

Don’t believe me? A case study…

Forbes’ virtually baseless article about Google laying off 10,000 employees was published 2022-11-21 at a time when no articles were being written about Google layoffs (but the threat of them was looming). So, every Googler and their TL read that article.

Last Thursday, 2022-12-08, Sundar gave a vague, noncommittal response in TGIF about layoffs. In other words: nothing of substance.

And 5 days later today, 2022-12-13, searching “google layoffs” leads you to this echo chamber of ridiculousness:

The Independent claiming to have a “report” says more about The Independent, really

To recap: Somehow, the combination of Sundar’s neutral remark and the existing fake Forbes article from 2 weeks prior produced fake news spread all across the front page of Google search. The top article in the Google search results page, from India Today, cites Business Insider, who doesn’t cite anyone. It’s nuts. Smells like Gell-Mann Amnesia.

Honestly, Google will probably conduct layoffs in the new year. But Google has literally never once in the history of the company performed sweeping underperformance-based layoffs. This type of misinformation is dumb and preventable.