Week 9 initiative:

I’m considering ‘clickbait’ as the initiative blog topic because it is the topic, which our group is going to analyze for PB4. Clickbait is very annoying but it works in our daily life actually. Generally, it is defined as the content whose main purpose is to attract attention and encourage visitors to click on a link to a particular web page. A huge amount of headlines are often misleading, unverified, and seldom corrected, those types of headlines are a major contributor to the spread of fake news on the Internet. Usually, they are prone to exaggeration and other forms of misinformation. Moreover, methods of clickbaiting can be identified through a consideration of the existence of certain linguistic patterns, such as the use of suspenseful language, a reversal narrative style, images placement. For example, one known method to efficiently manipulate emotion in observers is the strategic use of images, as well as directing perceptions through the proximity of the images to the headline. Images can serve to attract attention and are usually processed before the full article is read. It is found that clickbait often integrates the use of images as a way to interest users through misinformation. Readers spontaneously integrated information from a headline with a photo in the associated article.

As a number of new studies confirm, people blame their clickbait habit on two things: the outsized role emotion plays in their intuitive judgements and daily choices, and their lazy brain. Moreover, the author claimed that great headlines is to tell you a lot about what they are going to read, and persuade them to click because they know they will find a story that will satisfy their interest. In my opinion, I think if the publishers cheat the audiences and readers, it is going to be so hard to establish a long-term relationship with the audiences and readers and not possible to get their trust back.