The proliferation of clickbait headlines poses significant challenges to the credibility of information and user trust in digital media. While recent advances in machine learning have improved the detection of manipulative content, the lack of explainability limits their practical adoption. This paper presents a model for explainable clickbait detection that not only identifies clickbait titles but also attributes them to specific linguistic manipulation strategies. We introduce a synthetic dataset generated by systematically augmenting real news headlines using a predefined catalogue of clickbait strategies. This dataset enables controlled experimentation and detailed analysis of model behaviour. We present a two - stage framework for automatic clickbait analysis comprising detection and tactic attribution. In the first stage, we compare a fine - tuned BERT classifier with large language models (LLMs), specifically GPT - 4.0 and Gemini 2.4 Flash, under both zero - shot prompting and few - shot prompting enriched with illustrative clickbait headlines and their associated persuasive tactics. In the second stage, a dedicated BERT - based classifier predicts the specific clickbait strategies present in each headline. We share the dataset with the research community at https://github.com/LLM - HITCS25S/ClickbaitTacticsDetection The widespread use of clickbait headlines in digital media has become a pervasive challenge, undermining the credibility of information and exploiting user attention through manipulative linguistic techniques. While automated systems for detecting clickbait have improved in recent years, their focus has remained mainly on binary classification, simply labelling content as clickbait or not. However, effective mitigation of such content requires going beyond detection to understanding how and why certain headlines manipulate readers. Specifically, it is crucial to evaluate whether current AI models can accurately recognize and distinguish the diverse linguistic styles and persuasive strategies commonly employed in clickbait.

Online news outlets operate predominantly on an advertising-based revenue model, compelling journalists to create headlines that are often scandalous, intriguing, and provocative -- commonly referred to as clickbait. Automatic detection of clickbait headlines is essential for preserving information quality and reader trust in digital media and requires both contextual understanding and world knowledge. For this task, particularly in less-resourced languages, it remains unclear whether fine-tuned methods or in-context learning (ICL) yield better results. In this paper, we compile CLIC, a novel dataset for clickbait detection of Croatian news headlines spanning a 20-year period and encompassing mainstream and fringe outlets. We fine-tune the BERTić model on this task and compare its performance to LLM-based ICL methods with prompts both in Croatian and English. Finally, we analyze the linguistic properties of clickbait. We find that nearly half of the analyzed headlines contain clickbait, and that finetuned models deliver better results than general LLMs.

We revise the definition of clickbait, which lacks current consensus, and argue that the creation of a curiosity gap is the key concept that distinguishes clickbait from other related phenomena such as sensationalism and headlines that do not deliver what they promise or diverge from the article. Therefore, we propose a new definition: clickbait is a technique for generating headlines and teasers that deliberately omit part of the information with the goal of raising the readers' curiosity, capturing their attention and enticing them to click. We introduce a new approach to clickbait detection datasets creation, by refining the concept limits and annotations criteria, minimizing the subjectivity in the decision as much as possible. Following it, we created and release TA1C (for Te Ahorré Un Click, Spanish for Saved You A Click), the first open source dataset for clickbait detection in Spanish. It consists of 3,500 tweets coming from 18 well known media sources, manually annotated and reaching a 0.825 Fleiss' κ inter annotator agreement. We implement strong baselines that achieve 0.84 in F1-score.

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.

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.

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.

Clickbait, which aims to induce users with some surprising and even thrilling headlines for increasing click-through rates, permeates almost all online content publishers, such as news portals and social media. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a powerful instrument and achieved tremendous success in a series of NLP downstream tasks. However, it is not yet known whether LLMs can be served as a high-quality clickbait detection system. In this paper, we analyze the performance of LLMs in the few-shot and zero-shot scenarios on several English and Chinese benchmark datasets. Experimental results show that LLMs cannot achieve the best results compared to the state-of-the-art deep and fine-tuning PLMs methods. Different from human intuition, the experiments demonstrated that LLMs cannot make satisfied clickbait detection just by the headlines.

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.

This study presents a large multi-modal Bangla YouTube clickbait dataset consisting of 253,070 data points collected through an automated process using the YouTube API and Python web automation frameworks. The dataset contains 18 diverse features categorized into metadata, primary content, engagement statistics, and labels for individual videos from 58 Bangla YouTube channels. A rigorous preprocessing step has been applied to denoise, deduplicate, and remove bias from the features, ensuring unbiased and reliable analysis. As the largest and most robust clickbait corpus in Bangla to date, this dataset provides significant value for natural language processing and data science researchers seeking to advance modeling of clickbait phenomena in low-resource languages. Its multi-modal nature allows for comprehensive analyses of clickbait across content, user interactions, and linguistic dimensions to develop more sophisticated detection methods with cross-linguistic applications.

To increase revenue, news websites often resort to using deceptive news titles, luring users into clicking on the title and reading the full news. Clickbait detection is the task that aims to automatically detect this form of false advertisement and avoid wasting the precious time of online users. Despite the importance of the task, to the best of our knowledge, there is no publicly available clickbait corpus for the Romanian language. To this end, we introduce a novel Romanian Clickbait Corpus (RoCliCo) comprising 8,313 news samples which are manually annotated with clickbait and non-clickbait labels. Furthermore, we conduct experiments with four machine learning methods, ranging from handcrafted models to recurrent and transformer-based neural networks, to establish a line-up of competitive baselines. We also carry out experiments with a weighted voting ensemble. Among the considered baselines, we propose a novel BERT-based contrastive learning model that learns to encode news titles and contents into a deep metric space such that titles and contents of non-clickbait news have high cosine similarity, while titles and contents of clickbait news have low cosine similarity. Our data set and code to reproduce the baselines are publicly available for download at https://github.com/dariabroscoteanu/RoCliCo.