Clickbait—Trust and Credibility of Digital News

Clickbait headlines are compelling and designed to lure readers to click on the linked article. To understand their impact on the credibility of news items, we designed and conducted an experiment on news articles from the Web is-Clickbait-17 dataset. The role of readers' age and epistemic curiosity (EC) on clickbait propensity was also studied. Two datasets of six articles each of news relevant to North America and India were selected and each article was assigned a clickbait and a nonclickbait headline based on a pretest for clickbait perception. 200 participants (100 each of English-speaking American and English-speaking Indian) were instructed to click and read through any two articles of their choice and fill a credibility questionnaire. Epistemic curiosity and demographic data were collected at the end of the experiment. Clickbait headlines significantly reduced the credibility of news items. A correlation between age and propensity for clickbait was observed. No correlation was observed between diversive EC and clickbait propensity, while a weakly negative correlation was observed between specific EC and clickbait propensity. We hope that our findings may lead to a better end-user experience in terms of access to credible information for news readers, bereft of clickbait.