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Clickbait - Credibility, Visual Attention, Propensity and ProliferationAuthor: Vivek Kaushal Date: 2021-10-28 Report no: IIIT/TH/2021/104 Advisor:Kavita Vemuri AbstractNews is an essential component of the information we consume, and it plays a pivotal role in shaping our worldview. With the advent of technology, traditional distribution channels for news are increasingly being replaced by digital alternatives. This has led to a democratization of the entire journalistic landscape, where conventional economic entry barriers have been drastically reduced. Inevitably, this has also increased competition in the domain, with independent journalists and large media corporations alike vying for readers’ attention in the digital space. This attention is monetized either via advertisements on news pages or through an online subscription model. The ensuing competition has led media houses to use creative and somewhat devious news headlines to generate the all-important ’click’ from readers, which can be monetized. One such commonly used tactic is ’clickbait’. A clickbait is a news headline that encourages people to click on it to know more, without revealing much information about what the readers will see on the hyperlinked article, for example, ”You won’t believe what Apple showcased yesterday!” Clickbait works by rousing readers’ specific epistemic curiosity. The perception of an ’Information Gap’ is created in the mind of readers, where attention becomes focused on a gap in one’s knowledge based on the partial information conveyed by a clickbait headline. Readers click on such headlines to satiate the created knowledge gap, making clickbait effective in the process. Cognitive research has shown that clickbait is a form of attention distraction that increases stress and lowers productivity. The proliferation of clickbait also impacts readers’ news consumption experience. It has been called a diversion of publisher resources, away from quality value-added journalism towards a rapid-churning factory of digital serfs. Additionally, clickbait may also lead to the propagation of false information when readers rely solely on headlines with misleading or scarce information to form their worldview rather than reading complete articles. For example, a clickbait headline like “This is what X did to a dog” can have a subjective interpretation based on one’s bias towards X. If one has a preference for X, then without reading the article, the information gap will likely be filled, assuming a compassionate action for the dog. While, if one has a negative bias against X, inferences will be skewed in the opposite direction. The use of word-limited media platforms like Twitter would further perpetuate the above perceptions. The democratization of digital news media, while a positive development towards greater freedom of speech and allowing for alternate viewpoints, raises serious issues around the credibility of information. Our first study explored the impact of clickbait headlines on the credibility of news items through a study on 200 participants recruited on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. We found that clickbait headlines significantly reduce the credibility of a news item when controlled for the article’s content. To explore the demographic segments most likely to indulge clickbait headlines, we also looked at relations between clickbait propensity and factors like readers’ age, curiosity, news interests, news sources, education levels, gender, among others. Our second study was a first-of-its-kind exploration of the proliferation of clickbait in mainstream Hindi news media. The objective here was to bring to light the urgent need for further research in non-English languages. Clickbait detection research in Hindi and other regional languages lags far behind work done for English. 7 independent annotators were recruited to mark an aggregated 100 most retweeted news posts by five mainstream Hindi news sources. Clickbait proliferation in Hindi news media was found to be similar to English news media. Additionally, a positive correlation was found between readers’ interaction and the clickbait score of news headlines. In follow-up experiments, we looked at the consumption of clickbait in Hindi news media and its relation with readers – exploring clickbait propensity of different demographic segments, the role of curiosity, and the impact on credibility. We observed no significant difference in the click-through rate of clickbait and non-clickbait headlines for Hindi news articles. Interestingly, male participants had a significantly higher propensity for clickbait than female participants for Hindi news media. Clickbait had no impact on the credibility of news media for Hindi news articles. In our third study, we focused on the impact of clickbait headlines on readers’ visual attention. Visual attention was measured in a controlled lab experiment with subjects reading patterns observed under an eye-tracker setup as they browsed through news items. Additionally, recall was also measured through a questionnaire after the experiment. We observed that clickbait headlines significantly reduced the visual attention received by articles when controlling for the articles’ content. The recall was also lower for articles with clickbait headlines, although the difference failed to meet the criteria for significance. A strong positive correlation was observed between recall and gaze fixation duration. Through the work presented here in this thesis, we attempt to understand the impact of curiosity, attention, and other demographic parameters on readers’ propensity for clickbait headlines. We hope to add valued contributions to dialogues on creating a satisfactory news reading experience for digital news consumers where the information they consume is not sensationalized, misleading, or baiting. We also aspire to bring to light the urgent need for further research on the existing proliferation, detection, and containment of clickbait content in Hindi and other non-English languages. We strongly believe that our work would help align the incentives of news publishers and consumers and reduce the volume of clickbait in digital media. Full thesis: pdf Centre for Cognitive Science |
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