Want more views, clicks, engagement online? Cunningham’s law may hold the key—but at a cost I’m not willing to pay. Are you?

Cunningham’s law (it’s an observation actually) highlights a common internet phenomenon: if you have a question, don’t ask it. Give a wrong answer instead. An informed horde will assault your (false) statement. In a nutshell, Cunningham’s law postulates that more people (sometimes way more) will interact with your post or article to correct it than to answer a direct inquiry.

Let’s say I don’t remember who directed the 1997 mega-blockbuster movie Titanic and I decide to ask social media or internet forums. Cunningham’s law predicts two likely outcomes:

❌ Ask “Who did direct Titanic?”: very few replies, possibly even silence.

✅ State “Tarantino directed Titanic”: answers flood in to correct me—possibly belittling my cinematographic ignorance…

I suspect this cynical observation to be true. But I wouldn’t stop here; I’d take it one step further: a false claim at the beginning of your posts and articles—the hook, the crucial section that writers painstakingly craft to capture readers—might boost clicks, views and comments, thanks to the same phenomenon. Instead of letting readers correct it, you could simply rectify it after the hook has done its job.

But I am not comfortable misleading readers for more clicks, not even for just a paragraph. And the reason is simple.

While some people will feel the urge to rectify a ridiculous claim—let’s stick to our example about Titanic—many more will just scroll past my post and among them a few may start questioning if Tarantino did not actually direct the movie. Sure, no reader is likely to take me seriously in this ludicrous example. But what if my post is more subtle, if it touches upon a more obscure issue? What if my hook claims that DNA is actually a triple helix? A few will keep reading just to have the satisfaction of pointing out that the helix only has two strands, but a handful may just take it as factual if they stop at the hook…

And so, my intentionally misleading hook has made me no better than those who deliberately spread falsehoods and misinformation for their personal gains. I’d rather hassle more to find my answer, accept fewer clicks to my articles, improve my hooks in less shady ways, than to risk deceiving casual readers. There are already too many lies on the internet…