"Clickbait" titles do not bring more readers
Sensational headlines—also known as «clickbait»—don’t go over as well with readers as previously thought, as researchers at Pennsylvania State University and Michigan State University have shown in several studies. In some cases, this even leads to a decrease in traffic, according to the findings. Another finding: Artificial intelligence (AI) has an extremely hard time distinguishing clickbait articles from regular posts.
"Because fake news is a huge problem on social media, researchers are working hard to find ways to use AI to systematically identify and block clickbait," says Shyman Sundar, head of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Penn State. However, the latest studies would suggest that it is not so easy to track down fake news in this way. "Some believe that you only need to solve the clickbait problem to solve the fake news problem. But our studies show that clickbait is much more complicated than we thought."
"One of our initial questions was whether certain clickbait features can generate more clicks than others," explains Maria Molina, Assistant Professor in the Department of Advertising and Public Relations at Michigan State University. These include, for example, headlines with question marks at the end or with exaggerated negative or positive superlatives. The result surprised the experts themselves. "When we analyzed this in more detail, we found that there were no significant differences. People even seem to find normal headlines more appealing than clickbait," says Molina.
Three investigations carried out
The team from both universities conducted three studies. In the first, 150 people were shown one of eight randomly selected headlines on various topics and checked whether they subsequently read or shared the associated articles. In the second, 249 participants were recruited and shown eight headlines on the same topic - only one of which was clickbait. "In both studies, the clickbait articles did not receive more hits than the normal texts," says Molina.
A third study aimed to clarify whether AI can help to automatically detect clickbait in order to combat the spread of fake news. Various systems and machine learning models were tested for this purpose. "These systems only agreed on what could and could not be classified as clickbait in 47 percent of cases. So people who see clickbait headlines as an element for detecting fake news should reconsider their assessment," says Sundar. (pte)
