Clickbait news and algorithmic curation: A game theory framework of the relation between journalism, users, and platforms

Abstract

Algorithmic curation of social media platforms is considered to create a clickbait media environment. Although clickbait practices can be risky especially for legacy news outlets, clickbait is widely applied. We conceptualize clickbait content supply as a revision game with an unknown threshold. Combining supervised machine learning with time series analysis of Facebook posts and Twitter messages of 37 German legacy news outlets over 54 months, we observe outlets’ behavior following algorithm changes. Results reveal (1) an infrequent use of clickbait with few heavier-using outlets and (2) turning points of clickbait performance as clickbait supply and user interaction form a reversed U-shaped relationship. News outlets (3) collectively adjust toward an industry clickbait standard. While we (4) cannot prove that algorithmic curation increases clickbait, (5) Facebook’s regulative intervention to decrease clickbait disperses heterogeneous tendencies in clickbait supply. We contribute to an understanding of editorial decision-making in competitive environments facing platforms’ regulative intervention.

Is it Time to ‘Send in the Clowns’? What Happens to the ‘Rest of the News’ in Social Media during Extreme Crises

“…As ‘soft’ news appeared to attract users’ attention on social media more easily than ‘hard’ news, traditional media started re-shaping their social media presence based on what users like to consume and offer, with the technical help of algorithms, a customised experience of news consumption to their audience, based on demographic characteristics such as gender and age (Lischka & Garz, 2021). However, in times of extreme crisis, traditional media use social media in alternative ways, although their primary goal appears unaltered: Attracting users and clickbait.…”

Click me…! The influence of clickbait on user engagement in social media and the role of digital nudging

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Is sharing just a function of viewing? The sharing of political and non-political news on Facebook

“…This is strategically deployed in so-called "click bait" (Blom and Hansen, 2015), as it has been shown that these writing characteristics affect engagement metrics on social media (Horne et al, 2018). For example, such clickbait is characterized by using different grammatical constructions, more punctuation such as exclamation marks, and more numbers (e.g., Lischka and Garz, 2021).…”