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This is clickbait

This is clickbait

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This week’s best from the web

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Welcome to Fav’d For Later, a Friday roundup of our favorite memes, trends, and all-around good internet content. This week, we’re rediscovering the art of Rickrolling. For good.

As we barrel into another election season, people are finding new ways to get readers riled up and registered to vote. No longer content to trumpet “VOTE” into the Twitter void ad nauseam, clever users have taken the call one step further.

On Twitter, Ashlee Marie Preston shared a link with the news that Kim Kardashian had finally decided to leave Kanye West. Rather than linking to a story about celebrity marriage, however, users were instead directed to a voter registration page. Tim Cigelske repeated the viral joke, this time with the promise of answers about Pete Davidson and Ariana Grande’s recent split. “Rick Rolled for a purpose,” he wrote on Medium. “Commentary on our celebrity-obsessed culture. Clickbait for good.”

From there, publications like Elle picked up the torch, again featuring Kim and Kanye. It has since apologized for its “bad joke,” adding that “our passion for voter registration clouded our judgement and we are sincerely sorry.”

Owning your shortcomings is a sign of maturity and self-reflection. A big round of applause for the people who are forced to admit a hard truth about themselves this week: we all care about celebrity breakups. Whether you want to know what the breaking point was or who gets the pig, you’re just as thirsty for gossip as the rest of us.

For the record, this is what clickbait actually looks like. Please adjust your future angry tweets accordingly.

Elsewhere...

Maybe you haven’t been obsessively watching Shane Dawson’s Jake Paul documentary, and for that, I commend you. But for the last month, millions have kicked their 3PM responsibilities to tune into Dawson’s latest. Lilly Singh has the gist of it.

YouTube essayist Shannon Strucci launched a spinoff of the “Fake Friends” series, which focuses on parasocial relationships. “FAKE FRIENDS spinoff ep 1: Repeat Stuff and empathetic satire” focuses on Bo Burnham, a comedian, filmmaker, and creator who got his start on YouTube.

No Fav’d For Later would be complete without something musical from the internet. I can’t stop taking on this Kendrick Lamar and A-Ha mashup. Haha, do you get it? Do you get it? Dad, did you see my backflip? Let’s... get this bread?

I hate myself.

More from this stream Fav’d For Later: the best of the internet

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