Why is “headline knowledge” dangerous?

Ilya Ber, founder of the “Verified” project - about the structure of the news flow, clickbait, how we get “knowledge” and what we need to do to navigate the information field and, if possible, rely only on reliable information. That is, to really know what we are talking about.

Let's think about where most of today's people, especially young people, learn about what is happening in the world, that is, about the news? Of course, the correct answer is from everywhere. But the “share” of different mediums, that is, information providers, is not the same. Some of us still remember a time when, for most, the correct answer was “newspapers.” Then the focus shifted to radio and television, then Internet media appeared. And then everyone - newspapers, magazines, radio and TV - realized that if they weren’t online, they wouldn’t exist at all.

So almost all media has now become digital. But something else has changed. If previously people chose one, three or five sources of information for themselves and read (listened to, viewed) them completely, now we are increasingly receiving a personalized news feed selected from the entire variety of existing content. And social networks play a major role in this.

Ask yourself what share of news you get from reposts in your friend feeds, no matter if it’s Facebook, VKontakte, Twitter or Odnoklassniki. I believe that it is significant, perhaps even more than 50%. What does this repost look like in your feed? Usually in the form of a picture, automatically pulled from the publication, and its title.

By the way, this is how news looks on the websites of most online media and news aggregators. In Yandex.News - headlines. On the main page of mail.ru and rambler.ru there are headings. All headlines everywhere.

In this case, most often the headline conveys the main content of the news. And if this is so, then why click on the news itself (especially when it is not that important to us) if we have already learned its essence? It's better to keep scrolling the feed.

This is rational reasoning and rational behavior. But it leads us into a trap. This happens in cases where the news headline distorts its content, or even directly contradicts it. I suspect that everyone reading these lines has at least once encountered such a situation. And not surprisingly, this is not uncommon and not an exception to the rule.

Why is this happening? Do journalists and editors not understand what they are writing about, or are they deliberately deceiving people? Sometimes it happens that they don’t understand. But more often it’s the latter. It’s all His Majesty’s fault, clickbait! The task of a clickbait title (from English click - “click” + bait - “bait”) is to lure the reader to a page with the full text of the note, to force him to “click” on the title.

Here it is worth explaining how media headlines are written in the digital age. This is a difficult task in which the editor (headlines are usually his responsibility) must take into account several factors. In the case of quality journalism and work according to standards, the first is the actual correspondence of the headline to the material. The task is to briefly convey the essence without distorting the content.

The second is indexing, that is, accounting by Internet search engines. No one knows exactly how Google and Yandex algorithms work, especially since these algorithms change a little all the time. However, even 10 years ago it was known that a successful headline can “raise” material in search results, and an unsuccessful one, on the contrary, “lower”.

A successful one in the context of search engines is one that is “stuffed” with the maximum possible number of keywords related to this particular subject. First of all, proper names and nouns are important. In this case, the title must contain at least one verb. This requirement at one time seriously changed the “newspaper” concept of headlines. Subtle allusions, hints, wordplay and hidden quotes a la “Kommersant” of the 90s have almost disappeared from use.

The third is that very attractiveness. A good headline should be “catchy”, it should create tension in the reader, arouse interest in his brain, which can only be satisfied by clicking on the link and finding out the details. Actually, both the second and third factors have the same task - to get more readers.

And this is not a matter of simple vanity. The number of views is the main reporting, the KPI of the editor to the owner of the publication, proof of the effectiveness of his work. This may cause objections and dissatisfaction, but this is almost always the case and is true for both the “yellow” and the most authoritative media. Because qualitative measurements are much more complex and subjective. Views are a simple tool that everyone can understand. Yes, now they are trying to measure “view depth”, “readability”, time spent on the page, and so on. But clicks still come first.

Here, the editor every time has a huge temptation to embellish the news, to make the headline brighter, more scandalous, more unexpected than the text of the note. Many editors succumb to this temptation from time to time. And along the way, they often break away completely from the main text. And some people think that’s the only way it should be. This is where the notorious clickbait comes from.

From recent examples. Shortly after the news of the hospitalization of the head of Chechnya Ramzan Kadyrov in Moscow with COVID-19, Russia Today appeared news under the heading “Emelianenko spoke about Kadyrov’s condition.” At the same time, the very first phrase in the text of the note reads: “Fighter Alexander Emelianenko said that he is not aware of the health status of the head of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov.” Not only is there no newsworthy reason, but the headline also deceives the reader. Three days later, the headline was changed to one that corresponded to reality (“Emelianenko said that he does not know about Kadyrov’s condition”), but, of course, she had already collected her “scam” views by this time.

But a large regional publication has a different, let’s say, focus than the state RT - Znak.com. Same story. On May 22, a news item appears under the heading “The State Duma will consider a law on giving men priority when entering a university”. Wow, the reader will think! Why exactly? What kind of blatant sexism is this? What about the army?

Click on the news and find out that we are talking about the bill of a former State Duma deputy from the LDPR that men with a secondary specialized education should be given priority when entering a university in pedagogical fields. Little difference, right? In addition, the reader will find out that this bill has been hanging around in the Duma since 2017, it has been postponed all the time and now it is not a fact that it will be considered. And then the journalist honestly reports: “This bill will most likely be rejected. The Education and Science Committee has already recommended its rejection.”

As with RT, the headline was eventually changed. They took a quote from the article, and the previous title became a subtitle. But the Internet remembers everything. Simply read the article's URL, which matches the old title. 

There are also less obvious cases where there is no direct deception, but there are distortions that can have quite harmful consequences. For example, title "Izvestia", and also "Tapes.ru" And "Rossiyskaya Gazeta" from April 29: “A mathematical model predicted the peak of the coronavirus epidemic in Russia.” One can only imagine how many of the millions of people who saw the headline actually imagine how mathematical modeling actually works, and how many imagine some kind of robot, a black box or a glass ball that has superhuman intelligence and magical abilities, and therefore can predict the future. Why then be surprised at people’s faith in liquid chips, the digital gulag and animal fear of “artificial intelligence”?

But even putting aside fantasies, we can state that this headline is bad. Because there are hundreds of mathematical models, and each predicts its own timing of the peak of the epidemic in Russia and in the world. And only by clicking on the link, one could find out that we were talking about a specific model of a group of analysts from Sberbank, which predicted this very peak for the first ten days of May. 

On April 26, some media headlines revealed that “Four people in France died from an experimental drug against coronavirus”. At the same time, the text of the news did not mention any experimental medicine for coronavirus. They tried to treat patients with the well-known and proven anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, as well as the equally well-known anti-HIV drug Kaletra. Both drugs had strong side effects and it was eventually decided to abandon them.

One could give any number of such examples. But then the question arises, what to do with all this? The first understandable desire of many will be: to ban, punish, impose fines, not show in news feeds. And even some attempts were made in this direction. For example, in May 2017, Facebook announced about reducing the rating of materials in which the title and text do not correspond to each other. Have you noticed any changes? I doubt.

Many journalists and editors verbally condemn clickbait, although in fact they still continue to resort to it from time to time. But not everyone is condemned.

“There are at least two reasons to stop teaching others how to write headlines. The first is that content is just another type of product that needs to be tailored to the interests of consumers to sell. And second: if readers were really angry at clickbait headlines, didn’t finish reading the materials and never returned to hated sites, then most publications would have closed long ago for lack of traffic and a permanent loyal audience,” writes commercial director of Medialeaks publication Marina Karapetyan. 

For readers, news is new information that allows you to enrich or adjust your picture of the world. For a media manager, this is content that needs to be sold. Sales are coming, people are clicking and reading - the task is completed. And the consequences are no longer his concern and responsibility. You can feel the condemnation in these words. This is partly true. But first of all, a description of how the media works in this part. To understand the fact that fixing or changing this globally is very difficult, if not impossible. And this will happen, if it happens, not soon.

What should readers who do not want to receive distorted and unreliable information do right now? I'm afraid I don't know a good answer to this question. The only way to stop seeing dozens of headlines a day is to completely stop using social networks, and perhaps even the Internet altogether. Few people will find this path acceptable.

It’s also impossible to click on all the headlines that flash before your eyes in a row. You can go crazy from this, and no life is enough for this. So what to do?

The only option I know of is to increase your own awareness when consuming information. That is, try to remember at least approximately what and where you know from. It’s one thing if you read the available materials on some topic, spent time, tried to figure it out and form your own point of view. Other - if you just saw one or more headlines. These are fundamentally different situations. And if in the first case it is reasonable to have your own opinion about an event and broadcast it to someone, then in the second case it is better to admit to yourself that you really don’t know anything about the subject and forbid yourself to have an opinion about it, and even more so to share this opinion with someone.

It will most likely not be possible to automatically start remembering where this or that information comes from in your head. It is a skill that develops over time and, like any other skill, depends on the amount of practice and repetition. But for the majority of people who want to master it, I think this is quite achievable.