Pragmatic mechanisms of manipulation in Russian online media: How clickbait works (or does not)

Journal of Pragmatics. 2022. Vol. 195. P. 91–108.

Apresyan V., Orlov A.

Our study investigates clickbait – ambiguous misleading headlines, aimed at exploiting
readers’ curiosity gap. Clickbait has two unequally conspicuous interpretations, where
the first interpretation is false with respect to the article content, while the second
interpretation is correct content-wise, but considerably less obvious. We aim at
identifying linguistic structures and pragmatic mechanisms employed in creating
Russian clickbait, as well as testing the effectiveness of clickbait headlines
experimentally. To answer our research questions, we compiled, annotated and
analyzed a corpus of Russian clickbait headlines, as well as designed and ran an
online experiment. We demonstrate that the main device employed in creating clickbait
is a false generalized conversational implicature (GCI), created by flouting Gricean
maxims of Quantity, Manner, or Relevance, which is subsequently canceled by the
content of the article. We identify language-specific contexts conducive to their
occurrence, and show how journalists explore semantic, syntactic, and referential
peculiarities of the Russian language to create GCIs inherent in clickbait. Finally, we
demonstrate that not all clickbait headlines are effective: in order to attract clicks,
clickbait must not be obviously false and must increase the potential appeal and
importance of insufficiently engaging news pieces on topics that do not require
specialized knowledge.
 

Keywords: implicature, polysemy, clickbait, linguistic mechanism

Publication based on the results of: Practice as the medium for standards fluctuations (2020)