Headlines in internet media services: between informing and clickbaiting

Abstract

The paper presents the structural and semantic analysis of clickbait headlines in internet media services, which play a key role in attracting the attention of the recipient to specially prepared content. A modern media user consumes content that is interesting to him or her through headlines-hyperlinks. In an oversaturated information environment, the headline is an important supporting, attractively “packaged” element, which determines further actions of the internet-user. The data (headlines, announcements — leads — full texts) of such media resources as Национальная служба новостей https://nsn.fm/, Яндекс.Новости https://news.yandex.ru/, Рамблер.Новости https://news.rambler.ru/, EurAsiaDaily https:// eadaily.com/ru/news/, MsnНовости https://www.msn.com/ru-ru/news for 2016–2019 were used to form the body of the empirical material. Based on the analysis of the studied texts, the article substantiates the idea that clickbaiting aims at searching for non-trivial forms of linking information, which is revealed step by step as a result of clicking on the provided links. The author considers the lexico-stylistic, syntactic and structural organization of clickbait headers, as well as describes the popular mechanisms used in creating “clickable” content, such as character substitution and false death, semantic provocation techniques, heuristic techniques, citation, context modification, presenting the possible as real. The study showed that the linguistic architecture of clickbait headlines allows one to update false events and design falsified information, thereby developing fake media resources and viral advertising disguised as a news item.