The (Null) Effects of Clickbait Headlines on Polarization, Trust, and Learning

Background

There is far more news in today’s online world? than anyone could hope to consume, from a huge variety of sources. “Clickbait” headlines are frequently used by both legitimate and less-than-legitimate news sources to garner interaction from consumers of online news. Contemporary clickbait headlines use emotional and partisan appeals, raising concerns about their impact on these consumers. Though clickbait headlines have become increasingly common, their political implications are not well understood. Two major questions remain. First, what kinds of people are most likely to prefer clickbait headlines? Second, what are the effects of consuming clickbait headlines?

Study

To answer these questions, we run two experiments: one using Facebook ads that are explicitly targeting people with a high preference for clickbait and the other using a sample recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. We estimate subjects’ individual-level preference for clickbait by estimating what percentage of political stories the subjects chose to read that were clickbait, and randomly assign sets of subjects to read either clickbait or traditional headlines.

Results

Overall, we find that older people and non-Democrats have a higher preference for clickbait. We also find that reading clickbait headlines does not drive affective polarization, information retention, or trust in media. Our results suggest that the most important pathway by which clickbait could affect political outcomes is by changing which or how many news stories people consume. The upshot of these descriptive findings is that the impact of social media use on behavior and attitudes is heterogeneous. The heterogeneity of the effects of different media technologies is well established in political science and should be central to any study of media or persuasive effects on social media.