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Negativity Drives Online News Consumption (nature.com) 57

Posted by msmash from the what-sells dept.
Abstract of a paper on Nature: Online media is important for society in informing and shaping opinions, hence raising the question of what drives online news consumption. Here we analyse the causal effect of negative and emotional words on news consumption using a large online dataset of viral news stories. Specifically, we conducted our analyses using a series of randomized controlled trials (N=22,743). Our dataset comprises ~105,000 different variations of news stories from Upworthy.com that generated 5.7 million clicks across more than 370 million overall impressions. Although positive words were slightly more prevalent than negative words, we found that negative words in news headlines increased consumption rates (and positive words decreased consumption rates). For a headline of average length, each additional negative word increased the click-through rate by 2.3%. Our results contribute to a better understanding of why users engage with online media.
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Negativity Drives Online News Consumption More

Negativity Drives Online News Consumption

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  • Sad (Score:4, Interesting)

    by n0w0rries ( 832057 ) on Friday March 29, 2024 @01:06PM (#64354044)

    It's a sad human trait.

    A) You can make good news and sell it and have a good life.
    B) You can make bad news and sell it for 2.3% more per bad word, and you have slightly more money but you have a negative impact on the world.

    Anybody who picks B should be thrown in a volcano to fix global warming.

    • You can make good news and sell it and have a good life

      No such thing as good news. It is just bad news with a positive spin to it.
      I can see why people don't like it as much. Why read the bullshit version?

      • There are lots of good news. Like the world being more peaceful than in the past (in average), the number of deaths or new infections from deadly diseases is constantly decreasing (Malaria, AIDS), there are new treatments for certain cancer, etc. Of course there are other bad news like some other deaths from other cancers are increasing, but it's not at all that there is a real and a "bullshit" version of the reality, because these news items are presented independently and news outlets can choose the balan

        • “Alice laughed. 'There's no use trying,' she said. 'One can't believe impossible things.'

          I daresay you haven't had much practice,' said the Queen. 'When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. There goes the shawl again!”
          Lewis Carroll

          https://ourworldindata.org/muc... [ourworldindata.org]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by HBI ( 10338492 )

      It's worse than that. People want to find bad news that reinforces their existing biases. It's the reason why the most awful outlets get the most traffic, but it's also the reason the vast majority of people consume virtually zero news, because those extremist views are repellent to the common person.

      The word bandied about a decade ago was 'low-information voter'. i'd change that to 'low-propaganda voter'.

    • Yep, I clicked on this post because of the negative word in the headline ("Sad")...

    • This may have evolutional explanation. You want to learn about dangers to avoid them. Learning about good things is optional, good things to not pose immediate dangers. Thus it is not bad and logical. This is why if you want to manipulate people it is useful to scare them first.

      What can be done about this, I am not sure, though. Should anything be done about this at all?

    • The #AttentionEconomy works by hacking our human brains which pay an inordinate amount of attention to the things we fear, and the things we hate (things we want to have sex with come closely behind those two).

      The net result is that any free market in the #AttentionEconomy will inevitably maximize fear and hatred.

      The only antidote I've seen to this are those cultures which focus on decreasing resentment and increasing gratitude. You'll typically find this amongst religious folk.

      Ultimately, all victims of t

    • Its a proven fact that having your beliefs confirmed by another entity floods the brain with as much dopamine as sex.
  • And I hear that bad news sells newspapers ... for those that remember what that is.
    • following that boat accident in Baltimore every single right wing "star" jumped on it with increasingly crazy made up bullshit to hop onto the algorithm and score a few clicks.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Well, the greedy no-morals, no-integrity scum has taken over most places these days.

      • And when it's not politics, it's fires, vehicle/plane crashes, shootings, and bad weather.

        There's a catchy 80s song [youtube.com] about it.

        We got the bubble-headed bleached-blonde, comes on at five
        She can tell you 'bout the plane crash with a gleam in her eye
        It's interesting when people die
        Give us dirty laundry

  • my urge to click on '10 Reasons the World is Doomed' instead of 'Puppies Learning to Swim' is backed by science?

    Time to embrace my inner pessimist. #WhoNeedsPuppiesAnyway

    • And the "the world is doomed" article will be things like "In 5 billion years the sun will consume the earth!". Ahhh, I'll mark it on my calendar.

      • Slashdot: "Negativity drives online..." is followed by "memories are made of..." about a treatment for Alzheimer. It's already clear the bad one has more "online consumption" (more comments). It does not need to be "the earth will be scorched" kind of bad news.

    • Avoid the hidden danger which may be lurking right now in your food pantry, single mom discovers this one weird trick that could keep your family safe!

    • my urge to click on '10 Reasons the World is Doomed' instead of 'Puppies Learning to Swim' is backed by science?

      To be fair, the World ending is probably going to affect you more than puppies learning to swim, unless the oceans rise and you can't swim.

  • We have bad news. Negative news sells. While you're here, check out our other studies that show people that disagree with us are actually malevolent, and not just stupid like we formerly thought.

  • Fear and outrage sells (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Hoi Polloi ( 522990 ) on Friday March 29, 2024 @01:26PM (#64354106) Journal

    This has probably been the case since people told horror stories about hunting woolly mammoths. "If it bleeds it leads" and ragebait articles always get the most clicks. Titles are deliberately worded vaguely to inspire fear or outrage. Social media sites, like Reddit, thrive on outrage. Even if the article isn't ragebait the comments will steer the discussion in that discussion.

  • to be addicted to outrage and fear.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Brett Buck ( 811747 )

      Who is this "we", kimosabe? This is a relatively new phenomenon, it started during the Vietnam War, when media started transitioning from journalism to activism. This was the start of the "church of eternal outrage". Now, today, journalists see it as their highest calling to challenge any authority, not because of any specific issue they have, but because they see their primary job as uncovering malfeasance, either real or imagined - or invented out of the clear blue sky.

      I was certainly not

      • to be addicted to outrage and fear.

        This is a relatively new phenomenon

        Your ignorance of history is astounding. Go back and look at the polemics of Protestants and Catholics during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation when both sides regularly accused the other side of eating babies. And that's far from the only example.

        • I was referring to the modern media era of outrage.

            What you are talking about was a completely different phenomenon - so I would suggest you are the one who does not understand history.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by taustin ( 171655 )

          Or the earliest. Choosing a group to be "the enemy" and making the population afraid of them to the point of being genocidal has been a go to tactic for tyrants throughout all of human history.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by nyet ( 19118 )

          Evolution is much older than religion.

          The person crying tears of joy and wonder at rainbows and sunsets is less likely to reproduce than that crazy dude that is paranoid about getting eaten by a sabre tooth tiger.

      • Yes. The Pentagon Papers. Watergate. All The Presidents Men.

        Journalism students from that point didn't want to report the news, they wanted to make the news.

      • When Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon papers, and the NYT had the stones to publish articles about them, it showed that the US Government had been lying to Americans for decades about Vietnam. It showed that the Pentagon didnâ(TM)t think we could win the Vietnam War - at least not within the parameters it was permitted by the Executive branch trying to avoid nuclear war with China, which stood in stark opposition to public press releases expressing confidence in American victory over communism in Vietnam
  • I avoid most news because I'm an optimist and I see the puppet strings in major media. There are few organizations committed to telling the truth.

    • I avoid most news because I'm an optimist

      That and the fact that it is too difficult for you to read.

      • Can you explain in scientific terms how an illiterate person would operate on a text based forum without the use of a personal assistant? Or is that what you're implying - that this comment was dictated?
      • "Reading" piles of shit usually is difficult to a literate audience. I assume it's not a problem for the likes of you.
  • Advertisers, tech-monopolists and swarms of bots drive online news consumption.

    Consumers have no stake in or influence on the supply chain for mass media. They're not even capable of effectively manufacturing consent by convincing people of falsehoods anymore. They're just saying they did and pointing to the numbers under a tweet.

  • ...where the worst news on a typical day, is about how AI is going to lead to the extinction of humanity.

  • Does sound like junk-science to me. Probably paid for research that had a conclusion right from the start.

  • Yeah no kidding. Everything is amplified. It grabs eyeballs.

    • They probably guessed there was an effect, like you did, based on common wisdom. This is why they decided it was worth to make a study to quantify the effect. This is how science works.

      If you check the paper, there are graphs of correlations between click-through rates (CTR) and number of positive/negative words. The value of the correlation coefficient, or the slope of the curves, is not something you could have guessed by just saying "no kidding". It's actual science.

  • The real perversion is rushing to get out the "good news" that one of the groups you hate has done something awful.
  • has been known about since at least ~1740
  • I believe this has been a known misfeature of humanity for at least a few hundred years. Maybe we should try to find out if it's getting worse?

  • Good news is no news.

  • What's the possibility of getting a news source that's giving me just straight and complete facts, not curated for emotion, not carefully crafted to enhance some bias, not cherry-picked for a convenient narrative? I'm an adult and have enough EQ to handle bad news if it comes along, don't need puppy posts to keep me happy....

    But wait... here we have a /. post re. some negative human trait, and it got me riled up enough to reply with a rant. I've been played and I lost... again.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

      There is no one purely factual news source, you'll have to compare across multiple sources -- or just use Ground News, which does this for you.

  • Is it possible that we seek negative news because we are wired to look out for danger, anything that can affect us, even if on a remote/global scale?

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