Clickbait detection: quick inference with maximum impact

We propose a lightweight hybrid approach to clickbait detection that combines OpenAI semantic embeddings with six compact heuristic features capturing stylistic and informational cues. To improve efficiency, embeddings are reduced using PCA and evaluated with XGBoost, GraphSAGE, and GCN classifiers. While the simplified feature design yields slightly lower F1-scores, graph-based models achieve competitive performance with substantially reduced inference time. High ROC--AUC values further indicate strong discrimination capability, supporting reliable detection of clickbait headlines under varying decision thresholds.

ClickGuard: A Trustworthy Adaptive Fusion Framework for Clickbait Detection

The widespread use of clickbait headlines, crafted to mislead and maximize engagement, poses a significant challenge to online credibility. These headlines employ sensationalism, misleading claims, and vague language, underscoring the need for effective detection to ensure trustworthy digital content. The paper introduces, ClickGuard: a trustworthy adaptive fusion framework for clickbait detection. It combines BERT embeddings and structural features using a Syntactic-Semantic Adaptive Fusion Block (SSAFB) for dynamic integration. The framework incorporates a hybrid CNN-BiLSTM to capture patterns and dependencies. The model achieved 96.93% testing accuracy, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches. The model's trustworthiness is evaluated using LIME and Permutation Feature Importance (PFI) for interpretability and perturbation analysis. These methods assess the model's robustness and sensitivity to feature changes by measuring the average prediction variation. Ablation studies validated the SSAFB's effectiveness in optimizing feature fusion. The model demonstrated robust performance across diverse datasets, providing a scalable, reliable solution for enhancing online content credibility by addressing syntactic-semantic modelling challenges. Code of the work is available at: https://github.com/palindromeRice/ClickBait_Detection_Architecture

Acting Flatterers via LLMs Sycophancy: Combating Clickbait with LLMs Opposing-Stance Reasoning

The widespread proliferation of online content has intensified concerns about clickbait, deceptive or exaggerated headlines designed to attract attention. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising avenue for addressing this issue, their effectiveness is often hindered by Sycophancy, a tendency to produce reasoning that matches users' beliefs over truthful ones, which deviates from instruction-following principles. Rather than treating sycophancy as a flaw to be eliminated, this work proposes a novel approach that initially harnesses this behavior to generate contrastive reasoning from opposing perspectives. Specifically, we design a Self-renewal Opposing-stance Reasoning Generation (SORG) framework that prompts LLMs to produce high-quality agree and disagree reasoning pairs for a given news title without requiring ground-truth labels. To utilize the generated reasoning, we develop a local Opposing Reasoning-based Clickbait Detection (ORCD) model that integrates three BERT encoders to represent the title and its associated reasoning. The model leverages contrastive learning, guided by soft labels derived from LLM-generated credibility scores, to enhance detection robustness. Experimental evaluations on three benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms LLM prompting, fine-tuned smaller language models, and state-of-the-art clickbait detection baselines.

Baitradar: A Multi-Model Clickbait Detection Algorithm Using Deep Learning

Following the rising popularity of YouTube, there is an emerging problem on this platform called clickbait, which provokes users to click on videos using attractive titles and thumbnails. As a result, users ended up watching a video that does not have the content as publicized in the title. This issue is addressed in this study by proposing an algorithm called BaitRadar, which uses a deep learning technique where six inference models are jointly consulted to make the final classification decision. These models focus on different attributes of the video, including title, comments, thumbnail, tags, video statistics and audio transcript. The final classification is attained by computing the average of multiple models to provide a robust and accurate output even in situation where there is missing data. The proposed method is tested on 1,400 YouTube videos. On average, a test accuracy of 98% is achieved with an inference time of less than 2s.

SaRoHead: A Dataset for Satire Detection in Romanian Multi-Domain News Headlines

The headline is an important part of a news article, influenced by expressiveness and connection to the exposed subject. Although most news outlets aim to present reality objectively, some publications prefer a humorous approach in which stylistic elements of satire, irony, and sarcasm blend to cover specific topics. Satire detection can be difficult because a headline aims to expose the main idea behind a news article. In this paper, we propose SaRoHead, the first corpus for satire detection in Romanian multi-domain news headlines. Our findings show that the clickbait used in some non-satirical headlines significantly influences the model.

Multimodal Clickbait Detection by De-confounding Biases Using Causal Representation Inference

This paper focuses on detecting clickbait posts on the Web. These posts often use eye-catching disinformation in mixed modalities to mislead users to click for profit. That affects the user experience and thus would be blocked by content provider. To escape detection, malicious creators use tricks to add some irrelevant non-bait content into bait posts, dressing them up as legal to fool the detector. This content often has biased relations with non-bait labels, yet traditional detectors tend to make predictions based on simple co-occurrence rather than grasping inherent factors that lead to malicious behavior. This spurious bias would easily cause misjudgments. To address this problem, we propose a new debiased method based on causal inference. We first employ a set of features in multiple modalities to characterize the posts. Considering these features are often mixed up with unknown biases, we then disentangle three kinds of latent factors from them, including the invariant factor that indicates intrinsic bait intention; the causal factor which reflects deceptive patterns in a certain scenario, and non-causal noise. By eliminating the noise that causes bias, we can use invariant and causal factors to build a robust model with good generalization ability. Experiments on three popular datasets show the effectiveness of our approach.

Harmful YouTube Video Detection: A Taxonomy of Online Harm and MLLMs as Alternative Annotators

Short video platforms, such as YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok, are used by billions of users globally. These platforms expose users to harmful content, ranging from clickbait or physical harms to misinformation or online hate. Yet, detecting harmful videos remains challenging due to an inconsistent understanding of what constitutes harm and limited resources and mental tolls involved in human annotation. As such, this study advances measures and methods to detect harm in video content. First, we develop a comprehensive taxonomy for online harm on video platforms, categorizing it into six categories: Information, Hate and harassment, Addictive, Clickbait, Sexual, and Physical harms. Next, we establish multimodal large language models as reliable annotators of harmful videos. We analyze 19,422 YouTube videos using 14 image frames, 1 thumbnail, and text metadata, comparing the accuracy of crowdworkers (Mturk) and GPT-4-Turbo with domain expert annotations serving as the gold standard. Our results demonstrate that GPT-4-Turbo outperforms crowdworkers in both binary classification (harmful vs. harmless) and multi-label harm categorization tasks. Methodologically, this study extends the application of LLMs to multi-label and multi-modal contexts beyond text annotation and binary classification. Practically, our study contributes to online harm mitigation by guiding the definitions and identification of harmful content on video platforms.

Prompt-tuning for Clickbait Detection via Text Summarization

Clickbaits are surprising social posts or deceptive news headlines that attempt to lure users for more clicks, which have posted at unprecedented rates for more profit or commercial revenue. The spread of clickbait has significant negative impacts on the users, which brings users misleading or even click-jacking attacks. Different from fake news, the crucial problem in clickbait detection is determining whether the headline matches the corresponding content. Most existing methods compute the semantic similarity between the headlines and contents for detecting clickbait. However, due to significant differences in length and semantic features between headlines and contents, directly calculating semantic similarity is often difficult to summarize the relationship between them. To address this problem, we propose a prompt-tuning method for clickbait detection via text summarization in this paper, text summarization is introduced to summarize the contents, and clickbait detection is performed based on the similarity between the generated summary and the contents. Specifically, we first introduce a two-stage text summarization model to produce high-quality news summaries based on pre-trained language models, and then both the headlines and new generated summaries are incorporated as the inputs for prompt-tuning. Additionally, a variety of strategies are conducted to incorporate external knowledge for improving the performance of clickbait detection. The extensive experiments on well-known clickbait detection datasets demonstrate that our method achieved state-of-the-art performance.

BanglaBait: Semi-Supervised Adversarial Approach for Clickbait Detection on Bangla Clickbait Dataset

Intentionally luring readers to click on a particular content by exploiting their curiosity defines a title as clickbait. Although several studies focused on detecting clickbait titles in English articles, low resource language like Bangla has not been given adequate attention. To tackle clickbait titles in Bangla, we have constructed the first Bangla clickbait detection dataset containing 15,056 labeled news articles and 65,406 unlabelled news articles extracted from clickbait dense news sites. Each article has been labeled by three expert linguists and includes an article's title, body, and other metadata. By incorporating labeled and unlabelled data, we finetune a pretrained Bangla transformer model in an adversarial fashion using Semi Supervised Generative Adversarial Networks (SS GANs). The proposed model acts as a good baseline for this dataset, outperforming traditional neural network models (LSTM, GRU, CNN) and linguistic feature based models. We expect that this dataset and the detailed analysis and comparison of these clickbait detection models will provide a fundamental basis for future research into detecting clickbait titles in Bengali articles. We have released the corresponding code and dataset.

Mitigating Clickbait: An Approach to Spoiler Generation Using Multitask Learning

This study introduces 'clickbait spoiling', a novel technique designed to detect, categorize, and generate spoilers as succinct text responses, countering the curiosity induced by clickbait content. By leveraging a multi-task learning framework, our model's generalization capabilities are significantly enhanced, effectively addressing the pervasive issue of clickbait. The crux of our research lies in generating appropriate spoilers, be it a phrase, an extended passage, or multiple, depending on the spoiler type required. Our methodology integrates two crucial techniques: a refined spoiler categorization method and a modified version of the Question Answering (QA) mechanism, incorporated within a multi-task learning paradigm for optimized spoiler extraction from context. Notably, we have included fine-tuning methods for models capable of handling longer sequences to accommodate the generation of extended spoilers. This research highlights the potential of sophisticated text processing techniques in tackling the omnipresent issue of clickbait, promising an enhanced user experience in the digital realm.