Clickbait in H indi News Media : A Preliminary Study (2020)

Abstract: A corpus of Hindi news headlines shared on Twitter was created by collecting tweets of 5 mainstream Hindi news sources for a period of 4 months. 7 independent annotators were recruited to mark the 20 most retweeted news posts by each of the 5 news sources on its clickbait nature. The clickbait score hence generated was assessed for its correlation with interactions on the platform (retweets, favorites, reader replies), tweet word count, and normalized POS (part-of-speech) tag counts in tweets. A positive correlation was observed between readers’ interactions with tweets and tweets’ clickbait score. Significant correlations were also observed for POS tag counts and clickbait score. The prevalence of clickbait in mainstream Hindi news media was found to be similar to its prevalence in English news media. We hope that our observations would provide a platform for discussions on clickbait in mainstream Hindi news media.

## introduction a news headline provides a brief introduction to the news story and perhaps more importantly, lays emphasis on the focus and scope of the accompanying news article. a common journalistic advice is to present a clear attention-grabbing headline but to not exaggerate and misreport the news story or mislead the reader. with the advent of social media and news aggregators, newsreaders are encountering headlines from a variety of sources -established traditional publishers, up-and-coming online news sources, individual writers, among others -some of which apply questionable tactics to attract the attention of readers. this bombardment of information has led to an overload and hence readers gravitate towards sensationalism as a valid filter @xcite . in the digital media space, catchy headlines that lure readers to click on them and link to accompa-nying articles are called 'clickbait' @xcite . the social media site facebook has defined clickbait as an implementation of forward referencing -"when a publisher posts a link with a headline that encourages people to click to see more, without telling them much information about what they will see" @xcite . there is a growing fear that the line between traditional headlines, predatory clickbait and fake news is rapidly blurring @xcite . while there is agreement that not all catchy headlines are malicious, provided the corresponding article satisfies the information gap in the headline with factual reporting @xcite , the concern raised in journalistic circles is the intent to misuse literary techniques and mislead readers for mere profit. additionally, one needs to look into whether the traffic generated by clickbait headlines with minimal or untrue information leads to social distrust and affects cognitive processes. that is, are clickbait akin in nature to rumors and half-truths and more importantly, what is the impact of headline-only-readers (as reported by the satirical news site science post, which posted a catchy headline with nonsensical article content and found that nearly 46,000 shared the articlewithout even opening the article linked to the headline) foot_0 who could propagate misinformation by filling in the knowledge gaps by unverified intuitions and information from uncertified sources. the existing body of research on clickbait is overwhelmingly focused on the english language, except a few notable studies @xcite . this includes research on clickbait's reach, impact and its detection. in this preliminary study, we extend the english language clickbait headlines analysis to hindi. the interest is to understand whether journalists from non-english papers apply clickbait as strategy, as was found in a study of 28 eu news sources @xcite . by also considering the sharing behavior of headline readers, the aim is to understand relations between the demand-supply of clickbait headlines. we have reported the findings of a pilot study conducted on news headlines shared by five mainstream hindi news sources on twitter. in the country where the study was conducted, approximately 40% of the population's mother tongue is hindi foot_1 . all the recruited annotators had hindi as their native tongue and english as a secondary language. the large and rapidly growing reader-base which is increasingly present on social media, places the relevance of this study. we have annotated the most retweeted news headlines of the five selected news sources on its clickbait-nature and have done pos tagging of tweets' text. through a detailed correlation analysis of the 'clickbait-score' generated through manual annotation, with tweets' interaction parameters (likes, retweets, replies), text word count and normalized pos tag counts, we hope to understand the existence and reach of clickbait in hindi news media. the need to understand reader's reading behavior is important for a deeper discussion on the proliferation of clickbait, as studies have shown the impact of clickbait in causing higher stress levels and lowering productivity @xcite . ## results the average clickbait score for all the annotated hindi news tweets was μ = 0.433, σ = 0.30. bbc hindi had the highest average clickbait score (μ = 0.59, σ = 0.30), while dainik bhaskar had the lowest average clickbait score (μ = 0.22, σ = 0.21). clickbait scores of all the news sources in the dataset are illustrated (in figure 1 ). 21 out of the 100 most retweeted news headlines had a clickbait @xmath0.75, whereas 36 out of the 100 most retweeted news headlines had a clickbait @xmath1.25. a positive correlation was observed between clickbait score of tweets and all their interaction parameters on twitter -replies (@xmath2.25), retweets (@xmath3.19) and favorites (@xmath4.18). while the correlation was strongly negative (@xmath5.39) between tweets' parameter correlation with clickbait score (r) significance of correlation (p) replies 0.25 <0.05 retweets 0.19 0.05 favorites 0.18 0.07 word count -0.39 <0.001 ## discussion against common perception that clickbait is used largely by fringe players who do not post mainstream news material, @xcite had found that 33.54% of social media posts by mainstream english media was clickbait in nature. the ra clickbait score for our hindi corpus was positively correlated with interaction parameters on twitter, hence indicating that clickbait content is shared more widely and attracts higher reader attention. this observation is in agreement with existing clickbait research in the english language @xcite . a strong negative correlation observed between clickbait-score and word-count indicates that clickbait headlines in hindi are shorter than traditional non-clickbait headline. this is an interesting result that needs to be further examined to isolate effects from language-structure, as similar research studies in the english language have found non-clickbait headlines to be significantly shorter than clickbait headlines @xcite . the strong positive correlation observed between normalized wq (question word) counts and clickbait score is expected, as forward-referencea clickbait technique which involves the omission of a key piece of information in the headline, frequently relies on framing headlines as questions. e.g. "पा क तान म 15 पए स ता आ पे ोल, भारत म य नह ?" -which translates to "petrol prices reduced by rs.15 in pakistan, why not in india?" this headline does not provide any information on why petrol prices are not being reduced in india but generates curiosity by framing the headline as a question, and possibly the emotional/political connotations of the countries being compared. a positive correlation was observed between normalized counts of vaux (auxiliary verb), nnp (proper noun), qo (ordinals) and clickbait score, and a negative correlation was found between inj (interjection), dem (demonstrative), sym (symbol) and clickbait score. these findings require further study and analysis to fully understand the role of each pos tag in evoking curiosity and grabbing attention. journalistic guidelines suggest that auxiliary verbs are not necessary for perfect passive structures, a proper noun contextualizes and ordinals convey a position or rank which are recommended. hence, the positive correlation of the two latter pos with clickbait scores is explicable. the negative correlation with interjection is unanticipated as emotional valence attached is considered to be a strong bait for human attention. the similarities between the prevalence of clickbait content in mainstream hindi news media with recorded observations in english news media is insightful as the research to counter such content in hindi is fairly primitive. the authors of this paper are working to understand the impact of clickbait on the credibility of news media as perceived by readers @xcite and plan on scaling their work to news headlines in the hindi language. we hope that our work would provide a platform for discussion about clickbait in mainstream hindi news media. ## limitations the preliminary study and the inferences drawn is limited by the low number of annotators (7) and the filter applied to study only 100 headlines. further, cross-reference to article content of a headline was not included in this study, thus limiting the scores from only the headlines. the length of the headlines was not controlled, though not shown to affect the clickbait score, it could weigh the attention score.