专业事实核查机构在社交媒体中的“点击诱饵”及其传播效果研究

本研究考察了事实核查机构使用“点击诱饵元素”的现状，并对其传播效果进行评估。本研究通过人工标注样本以训练机器学习模型的方法，分析了12家美国专业事实核查机构过去两年间在其推特账号上发布的24670条用于推广核查报告的推文。研究发现，五分之一的推文包含点击诱饵元素。对于有影响的事实核查机构而言，当其在核查时政和公共卫生议题时，点击诱饵元素对推文的传播效果有负面影响。本研究讨论了该结果对理论、方法和网络内容管理实践层面的启示。

Social media has become a crucial channel through which public communicators—such as government and public sectors, journalists, and professional organizations—distribute their work and engage users. The present study addresses a controversial issue for fact-checkers, such as balancing the comprehensive analytical fact-checking messages and gaining audiences' attention to promote their fact-checking reports. Informed by the heuristic-systematic model and empirical studies on message effects, the present study examines the extent to which the clickbait elements (elements designed to attract the readers to click) influence a messages' user engagement (i.e., the number of favorites and retweets of the posts). We analysed a total of 24670 Twitter messages promoting their fact-checking reports from 12 professional fact-checking organizations in the U.S. listed by the International Fact-checking Network (IFCN). We trained a supervised machine learning model based on manually labelled data to analyze these organizations' public tweets published over the past two years. We found that roughly one-fifth of the posts contained one clickbait element. We also found a sharp contrast between editorial fact-checkers and independent fact-checkers regarding clickbait usage on social media. We found that when clickbait may trigger more retweets and favorites, for those organizations with a large number of followers, clickbait is negatively related to user engagement. The same pattern also holds when communicating political and public health topics. We discussed the theoretical, methodological, and managerial implications of the results.