To provoke outrage is the point of rage bait. Research in communication is starting to explain how rage bait hacks the way our brains decide what we choose to read, watch and even click and swipe online. What’s more, the worse we feel, the more we seem to prefer it.
In a new study, people who were encouraged to follow mainstream news organizations on Instagram and WhatsApp were better at identifying true from false news stories. News followers were also more aware of important events and had more trust in news media and journalists.
Over the past few years, there have been extensive changes in content moderation policy on social media platforms. As companies like X and Meta loosen these policies, users have reported an increase in hate speech. So what caused this shift? Professor Cuihua (Cindy) Shen, who specializes in computational communication, provided insight into the evolving policies of major social media platforms, the rise of hate speech, and the role of algorithms in its spread.
New research identified 10 key features of clickbait journalism on social media and compared its use between digital-native news media and legacy news media outlets. The study confirmed that digital-native media outlets are much more likely to use clickbait, and that it really does drive engagement in the form of likes and reposts, but may accelerate a decline in media trust.
A multidisciplinary research team in communication and computer science performed a systematic audit of YouTube’s video recommendations in 2021 and 2022 to test how a person’s ideological leaning might affect what videos YouTube’s algorithms recommend to them.
