What is Fake News | Center for Information Technology and …

Clickbait refers to a headline or the leading words of a social media post (the teaser message) written to attract attention and encourage visitors to click a target link to a longer story on a web page [4]. Clickbait offers odd, amazing, or suspenseful phrases that induce curiosity, and entice people to want to know more. Like this:

Source: Medium.com

They dont need pictures to be clickbait. For example,

Clickbait is a common way that fake news (and any kind of content) is spread. Clickbait depends on creating a curiosity gap, an online cliffhanger of sorts that poses headlines that pique your curiosity and lead you to click the link and read on. The gap between what we know and what we want to know compels us to click. To an extent, the more outrageous a teaser message is, the more successful clickbait may be.

Besides curiosity and outrage, clickbait often uses a number of language characteristics that draw people in. Many clickbait headlines offer a list of some kind these 10 things that will blow your mind about and the titles have a number in them (and usually start with it) [6]. According to a review by Martin Potthast and colleagues [4], clickbait teasers contain strong nouns and adjectives, but use simple, easily readable language. They use these and this a lot.

You see these attention-getting strategies in conventional tabloids, too, like the National Enquirer. Theyre the kind of goofy leads that The Onion likes to parody.

Clickbait motivates further reading, instantly, and further reading promotes advertising for website publishers, so its a widespread practice. Fake news headlines often look this way, just as they did in the fake news peddled by tabloids and the era of yellow journalism.

References

[1] H. Allcott and M. Gentzkow, Social Media and Fake News in the 2016 Election, Journal of Economic Perspectives, vol. 31, no. 2, pp. 211236, May 2017.

[2] D. M. J. Lazer et al., The Science of Fake News, Science, vol. 359, no. 6380, pp. 10941096, Mar. 2018.

[3] E. C. Tandoc, Z. W. Lim, and R. Ling, Defining Fake News: A Typology of Scholarly Definitions, Digital Journalism, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 137153, Feb. 2018.

[4] M. Potthast, S. Kopsel, B. Stein, and M. Hagen, Clickbait Detection, in Advances in Information Retrieval: 38th European Conference on IR Research, ECIR 2016, Switzerland: Springer, 2016, pp. 810817.

[5] Y. Chen, N. J. Conroy, and V. L. Rubin, Misleading Online Content: Recognizing Clickbait as False News, 2015. [Online]. Available: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2823465.2823467. [Accessed: 03-Aug-2018].

[6] B. Vijgen, The Listsicle: An Exploring Research on an Interesting Shareable New Media Phenomenon, Studia UBB Ephemerides, vol. 59, no. 1, pp. 103122, Jun. 2014.

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What is Fake News | Center for Information Technology and ...