Clickbait in Hindi News Media : A Preliminary Study

TL;DR

This study analyzes the prevalence and impact of clickbait in Hindi news headlines shared on Twitter, revealing positive correlations between clickbait scores and user engagement, and comparing its prevalence to English media.

Contribution

It introduces a novel corpus of Hindi news headlines, assesses clickbait levels, and explores their correlation with social media interactions, filling a gap in non-English media research.

Findings

Positive correlation between clickbait score and user engagement.

Significant correlation between POS tags and clickbait.

Prevalence of clickbait similar to English news media.

Abstract

A corpus of Hindi news headlines shared on Twitter was created by collecting tweets of 5 mainstream Hindi news sources for a period of 4 months. 7 independent annotators were recruited to mark the 20 most retweeted news posts by each of the 5 news sources on its clickbait nature. The clickbait score hence generated was assessed for its correlation with interactions on the platform (retweets, favorites, reader replies), tweet word count, and normalized POS (part-of-speech) tag counts in tweets. A positive correlation was observed between readers' interactions with tweets and tweets' clickbait score. Significant correlations were also observed for POS tag counts and clickbait score. The prevalence of clickbait in mainstream Hindi news media was found to be similar to its prevalence in English news media. We hope that our observations would provide a platform for discussions on clickbait in mainstream Hindi news media.