Negativity drives online #news consumption
Dataset comprises ~105,000 different variations of stories from Upworthy.com with ∼5.7M clicks across more than 370M impressions. Although positive words were slightly more prevalent than negative words, we found negative words in news #headlines increased consumption rates (positive words decreased consumption rates). For headline of average length, each additional negative word increased click-through rate by 2.3%. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01538-4
AP headline: "A big airline is relaxing its pet policy to let owners bring the companion and a rolling carry-on"
Which one? I need to know to avoid them. (It's American, as it turns out, my least favorite US airline.) They really had to contort to avoid putting the only important part of the story right in the headline, didn't they?
(I was wondering what was going on with commercial real estate prices in Arkansas, but it's not about that -- it's about a DOJ charge against a company and their warehouse's sanitary conditions).
News items in my feed usually come with a teaser picture. Sometimes the picture provides useful context, more often it is totally useless like this one, a picture of some guy.
The headline has four nouns "FBI dismantles Ubiquiti Router Botnet Controlled by Russian Cyberspies"
I'm left wondering, because the article never says, is the guy
a) the author of the article
b) an FBI agent
c) a Russian bot
d) a Ubiquiti router, or
e) a Russian Cyberspy ?
It is not only the US where #democracy and the #RuleOfLaw are at risk of being dismantled by authoritarians akin to fascists. Similar tendencies can be seen all around the world, including countries that keep under the radar of global news, such as Slovakia.
The country of five million at the "heart" of Europe is small enough to be overlooked (and rightly so) in the greater scheme of things, making international #headlines only when it fucks up on a large scale.
Nothing that comes out of #Trump's mouth has any connection with #reality. Not one word. Every day it's more #absurd than the last. And yet far too many #media outlets report on it as if it was normal. There should be no #headlines reporting on his words that don't also include a disclaimer that it's a #lie. The media has to be more #vigilant.
(Yes, it's a funny sectionhead today, but it's taken from a very serious book on adulteration of foods from 1820, and in this case the poison was from red lead used in the coloring agent.)