# Interrupted time series analysis of clickbait on worldwide news websites, 2016-2023

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.06376 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06376/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 8 Aug 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Did ChatGPT or Copilot use alter the style of internet news headlines? A time series regression analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.23811/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Clickbait is deceptive text that can manipulate web browsing, creating an information gap between a link and target page that literally baits a user into clicking. Clickbait detection continues to be well studied, but analyses of clickbait overall on the web are limited. A dataset was built consisting of 451,033,388 clickbait scores produced by a clickbait detector which analyzed links and headings on primarily English news pages from the Common Crawl. On this data, 5 segmented regression models were fit on 5 major news events and averaged clickbait scores. COVID and the 2020 US Election appeared to influence clickbait levels.