Clickbait in Hindi News Media : A Preliminary Study
This study provides initial insights into the prevalence and characteristics of clickbait in Hindi news media, which is important for understanding media consumption patterns in India.
This study created a corpus of Hindi news headlines from 5 mainstream sources on Twitter over 4 months. It found a positive correlation between clickbait scores and reader interactions (retweets, favorites, replies), and also between POS tag counts and clickbait scores. The prevalence of clickbait in Hindi news media was similar to English news media.
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.