Social media has an important position for society in terms of informing people and shaping their ideas. Therefore, what drives online news consumption is also an important factor.
What does this mean? Which type of news on social media means more clicks by the society. ‘Nature Human Behaviour’, a 2023 study on this subject, reveals what type of news people read more and why.
News with negative elements are more popular with the society
As part of the Natural Human Behaviour study, researchers analyzed the causal effect of negative and emotional words on news consumption using a large online dataset of viral news stories.
Specifically, we performed their analysis using a series of randomized controlled trials (N = 22,743). The researchers’ dataset includes more than 370 million overall impressions, about 5.7 million clicks, and about 105,000 different news variations.
As a result of the analysis of the data, it was revealed that although there are more positive words in a content, negative words in the title increase content consumption. In fact, it would be wrong to say that it has emerged, let’s say it has been academically proven.
According to the researchers’ data, for an average-length title (8-12 words), each negative word in the title increases the click-through rate of the content by 2.3%.
Researchers do not have clear data on why this is, but of course there are assumptions. Here are his own words:
“Negative emotions with high arousal levels, such as anger or fear, have been scientifically proven to attract attention effectively and respond quickly to facial expressions and body language.
This may be because of the social and informational value that highly evoked emotions such as anger and fear have, both of which can alert others in one’s group to threats, and priority attention and recognition to these emotions can help the group survive.
This may also be why people are more likely to share and interact with online content that contains anger, fear or sadness.”
After telling all this, you now understand why certain sites use provocative headlines to attract clicks on Twitter. We consumers are the reason why content producers are making headlines like this. If we stop craving them, we can ensure that creators don’t use them anymore and make social media a more humane place.
If not now, maybe someday…
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