The study “Emotion Sells: Rage Bait vs. Information Bait in Clickbait News Headlines on Social Media” by Jieun Shin and Chris DeFelice from University of Florida and  Soojong Kim from University of California developed an understanding of the types of clickbait articles news organizations use on the social media, dividing them into information bait and rage bait categories.

Competition in the field of media has given rise to the phenomenon known as the clickbait. It is a common journalistic practice recognized by the public, and it is not a loved one – it is listed as one of the major concerns with journalism (Dvorkin 2016). However, a clear understanding of what constitutes a clickbait is still lacking, which is what this study seeks to address.

The first of the two types of clickbaits identified in this study is the information bait. In it, crucial information is left out of the headline, prompting the reader to click the article to find the missing information. Scacco and Muddiman (2020) call this type of clickbait “curiosity headlines”.

Although it is not problematic in itself, it does violate the traditional journalistic principle that the headline should already be a summary of the story and the inverted pyramid type of news writing, where the most important information is in the beginning. 

The more insidious rage bait is a type of headline that invokes negative emotions immediately, capturing attention and provoking angry reactions. There is danger in invoking negative emotions in news reporting as it may reinforce existing beliefs in the readers, as they are likely to receive information that confirms with their worldview better than something that challenges them, and discourages information-seeking. 

Clickbait has spread to all news, but there is also a relationship between the ideology of the outlet and the tendency to use clickbaits. Research has uncovered that conservative outlets respond more to clicks, shares, and comments and are less likely to conform with traditional journalistic practices. Likewise, less educated and more conservative users have been found to prefer clickbaits more.

The study at hand chose news stories from 95 outlets in social media (Facebook) accounts of the news outlets, and coded them as either information bait, rage bait, both, or neither. A total of 568 stories were used.  

Contrary to the expectations, even legacy media resorted to clickbaits just like other media, but preferred the more ‘acceptable’ information bait. However, conservative media used rage baits much more, which might warrant further investigation and studies. When it comes to engagement in social media, information bait headlines performed poorly, but rage bait drove engagement. 

The authors ponder the surprising result of poor engagement for information bait headlines, and suggest that it might be that the type of news in the stories, hard news, might have something to do with it. The authors also caution that anger and thus rage bait is somewhat subjective, which may have interfered with the coding. 

The article “Emotion Sells: Rage Bait vs. Information Bait in Clickbait News Headlines on Social Media” by Jieun Shin, Chris DeFelice and Soojong Kim is in Digital Journalism. (free abstract).

Picture: Just Mad by Andre Hunter.

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