You're in line at the grocery store and you see the headline "Bigfoot Found!" plastered on the cover of the National Enquirer. You may even pick it up and read it while you're in line.

Headlines like those found in tabloid magazines could be considered the earliest example of "clickbait" as we know it — words that grab the reader's attention, but have little substance or misleading information.

Clickbait is rampant across social media outlets — particularly Facebook — and the number of readers taking the bait is at an all-time high. The biggest example of this was seen during the 2016 U.S. election cycle.

As President-elect Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton went back and forth on the issues, their supporters relied on hyperpartisan Facebook feeds to fuel the fire as to why their candidate was the best choice, or what the other side was doing.

Generally, these pages had thousands of users who would consistently post misleading information, according to a Buzzfeed News study about hyperpartisan Facebook pages .

The study showed that the least accurate pages, such as Occupy Democrats and Eagle Rising, generated the highest numbers of shares, reactions and comments on Facebook — more than the three large mainstream political news pages (Politico, CNN Politics, ABC News Politics).

"Our analysis of three hyperpartisan right-wing Facebook pages found that 38 percent of all posts were either a mixture of true and false or mostly false, compared to 19 percent of posts from three hyperpartisan left-wing pages that were either a mixture of true and false or mostly false," said BuzzFeed News in their study.

Facebook has 1.79 billion monthly active users, many of these users rely on the site for all their news content, and news outlets bank on that fact. Facebook has evolved into more than just a site where people can just stay in touch. It has become a business tool where businesses — especially news outlets — can publish or create content, allowing users to comment and share, creating a wider reach in audience while still making a profit.

According to the Pew Research Center, 66 percent of Facebook users get their news from the social media website. With that much of a reach, the rise of Facebook news sites with inaccurate information continues to grow.

During the high peak of media coverage about the Zika virus, research showed that 4 out of 5 popular posts on Facebook about Zika contained accurate information. But inaccurate information about the virus or conspiracy theories were more popular than legitimate information from credible sources such as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the World Health Organization.

"What was most disturbing to me was the websites or videos that are giving this misinformation are trying to take the focus completely away from the issue," lead author Dr. Megha Sharma, a neonatal-perinatal medicine fellow at the Medical College of Wisconsin, told Reuters in an interview about the research.

The study showed 81 percent of the 200 popular Facebook posts or videos researchers chose for the study contained accurate or useful information about the virus. About 12 percent of the posts had misleading information.

"A lot of this has to do with how information is presented," Sharma said. She also added that websites that created posts with inaccurate information were more "in your face" than posts from credible sources.

"I understand that this is a very hard issue to deal with because there has to be freedom of speech and impression on social media," Sharma said.

Back in September, Facebook along with other media organizations such as The New York Times and The Washington Post and social media platform rival Twitter joined the First Draft Partner Network, which aims to improve practices in reporting and sharing online news.

"The network will help Facebook showcase the products, tools and services we have built for journalists but also ensure we are constantly learning about how to improve them based on feedback from newsrooms," said Áine Kerr, Facebook's journalism partnerships manager in The Guardian. "We want to ensure we are building opportunities to learn from the industry and to ensure we continually hear their questions and feedback."

Although Facebook has signed on to become stricter in their reporting and sharing online news, the social media website received harsh criticism that they may have influenced the general election.

"Personally I think the idea that fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of the content, influenced the election in any way — I think is a pretty crazy idea," Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said two days after the election. "Voters make decisions based on their lived experience."

But in a recent statement, Zuckerberg backpedaled on his comments to iterate that Facebook could do more to squash out fake news content.

"Our goal is to show people the content they will find most meaningful, and people want accurate news," Zuckerberg said. "This is an area where I believe we must proceed very carefully, though."