Against Clickbbait by Schopenhauer

This decade has seen the elevation in the number of internet users and the rise of online media platforms and the cyber ecosystem. We are witnessing a significant transformation in terms of society, culture, and media. As social media and cyberspaces reaching out the new inventions and connecting the missing dots, fraudulent practices are also on the rise. The use of falsified hyperlinks and thumbnails to lure users into the web of deception has been proliferating. Often regarded as "clickbait," the practice is a becoming a severe concern even for the mainstream media as it is frequently used by leading online portals and news aggregators, putting journalistic ethics on the ledge. The practice initiated with the commercial purpose, often, end up accumulating personal information from users, spreading junk content over the internet, and manufacturing nuisance. Understanding the concept of clickbait has been a challenge itself-hence, this study attempts to comprehend the domain and rationale. Also, it investigates the roots of clickbait and its presence in Indian online news media. Further, it attempts to recognize the victims of clickbait and enquire their vulnerability and perception.

Social Communication. Online Journal, 2019

With the arrival of the Internet the already-existing mass media have undergone a complete revolution. Among the most affected subtypes one could easily distinguish the press, which had to find its own place within the new medium. The fierce competition in the realm of online publishing has engendered a number of idiosyncratic linguistic devices used to lure the readers. One of the most popular ones is the phenomenon recognized as clickbait, i.e. an umbrella term for a number of techniques used to attract attention and arouse curiosity. In the following paper, we shall investigate the presence of the said phenomenon in online headlines. In order to do that we shall perform a corpus based analysis of the data acquired from the most popular American social news outlets on the Internet, namely Buzzfeed, TMZ and E!Online. Apart from establishing the extent to which clickbait has dominated online headlines, we shall also pinpoint and discuss the specific linguistic techniques used to attract potential readers.

In Proceedings of 2017 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM 2017)

The use of alluring headlines (clickbait) to tempt the readers has become a growing practice nowadays. For the sake of existence in the highly competitive media industry, most of the on-line media including the mainstream ones, have started following this practice. Although the widespread practice of clickbait makes the reader's reliability on media vulnerable, a large scale analysis to reveal this fact is still absent. In this paper, we analyze 1.67 million Facebook posts created by 153 media organizations to understand the extent of clickbait practice, its impact and user engagement by using our own developed clickbait detection model. The model uses distributed sub-word embeddings learned from a large corpus. The accuracy of the model is 98.3%. Powered with this model, we further study the distribution of topics in clickbait and non-clickbait contents.

Dialogos, 2022

ArXiv, 2019

The topic of clickbait has garnered lot of attention since the advent of social media. Meriam-Webster defines Clickbait as something designed to make readers want to click on a hyperlink especially when the link leads to content of dubious value or interest. Clickbait is used synonymously with terms with negative connotations such as yellow journalism, tabloid news etc. Majority of the work in this area has focused on detecting clickbait to stop being presented to the reader. In this work, we look at clickbait in the field of education with emphasis on educational videos that are authored by individual authors without any institutional backing. Such videos can become quite popular with different audiences and are not verified by any expert. We present findings that despite the negative connotation associated with clickbait, audiences value content regardless of the clickbait techniques and have an overall favorable impression. We also establish initial metrics that can be used to ga...

Journal of Pragmatics, 2021

Aslib Journal of Information Management, 2020

PurposeIntegrating the uses and gratifications (U&G) theory, the notion of information richness and personal epistemology framework, the purpose of this research is to propose and empirically validate a framework which specifies Internet users' urge to click clickbaits.Design/methodology/approachThe hypotheses in the proposed framework were tested using a between-participants experimental design (N = 204) that manipulated information richness (text-only vs. thumbnail clickbaits).FindingsCuriosity, perceived enjoyment and surveillance were significant predictors of the urge to click. In terms of information richness, the urge to click was higher for thumbnail vis-à-vis text-only clickbaits. IEB (IEB) moderated the relation between the gratification of passing time and the urge to click.Originality/valueThis paper represents one of the earliest attempts to investigate Internet users' urge to click clickbaits. Apart from extending the boundary conditions of the U&G theory, it i...

2016

Townend. J., Muller, D. and Keeble, R.L. (2016). Beyond clickbait and commerce: The ethics, possibilities and challenges of not-for-profit media, Ethical Space, Vol.13 No.2/3, Abramis.

Frege as Clickbait, 2023

Bobzien’s reply to a defamatory blogpost on her essay ‘Frege plagiarized the Stoics’ in which she is accused among other things of plagiarism (!), and deliberate deception, and which contains a large number of falsehoods. (This reply is a minor contribution to the discussion of 'Frege plagiarized the Stoics', simply setting the record straight. It contains no important philosophical content whatsoever.)

Elektronik Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, 2016