Intellectual Clickbait: Helping or Harming Science?
‘Science’ as it were, has historically had trouble attracting the attention of the masses. I have made a point of trying to make it more digestible and more interesting through my blogs, but some take it a step further. Scientific papers can be very interesting to a wide audience if framed in a simple light, so it didn’t take long for the entrepreneurs of the internet to take notice.
One of the most popular sites, IFLScience.com, is one of those groups that takes it a step further. Their headlines are often filled with sensationalizing buzzwords that are meant to drive clicks, but sometimes, albeit rarely, they swerve into nearly dishonest.
Another site, ScienceBlog.com, has a much less dramatic flair to it, and for that reason I find it to be more honest, in a way. In my opinion, IFLScience seems more interesting in driving clicks than spreading educational value, which is by no means a crime, but it is harmful.
To this end, I will be looking at four articles, two from each site, but covering the same two events. The first being NASA’s TESS (Transiting Exoplanets Survey Satellite) discovering its first approximately Earth-sized exoplanet (that being, a planet outside our solar system) since its first photograph taken in August of 2018.
The two articles had fairly similar titles: IFLScience’s read “NASA’s New Planet Hunter Has Found Its First Earth-Sized World”, while ScienceBlog ran with a much less exciting “TESS Discovers Its First Earth-Sized Planet”. Just in those two headlines, we already see differences. The former uses more colorful language with more exciting implications, such as ‘Hunter’, which likely intends to evoke a feeling of adventure or thrill. The latter is much more basic, but gets the actual message across just as clearly.
Another aspect to consider is the lengths of the articles. While word count alone is a poor metric of content, it does help illustrate my point to a degree. The evocative, ‘clickbait’ article from IFLScience is 495 words long, while the more ‘honest’ article from ScienceBlog is 853 words. The former article only contains the basic information, while the latter goes into much deeper detail.
The ScienceBlog article covers background information and goes into more specific details regarding the actual incident. While the IFLScience page gives the reader a general, surface-level idea, it misses out on some information. Whether than information is relevant is a personal decision, but the less information presented, the more of a chance that key components are omitted. In many ways, it is the responsibility of the author to provide the relevant information, but the reader must also determine if their sources are reliable.
The second pair of articles is about researchers at the University of Michigan who have developed a system using ‘cold plasma’ to kill airborne viruses. The title comparison is much more similar this time, with IFLScience reading “Scientists Invent Device That Can Kill 99.9 Percent Of Airborne Viruses” and ScienceBlog reading “Cold Plasma Can Kill 99.9% Of Airborne Viruses”. These are only different by a few words, but IFLScience has ommited what exactly the ‘device’ is, potentially leading to more curious clicks.
While the meat of the articles in question are quite similar, even using the exact same quotes in certain situations, the ending lines set the articles apart. ScienceBlog ends their coverage with “ Animal agriculture and its vulnerability to contagious livestock diseases such as avian influenza has a demonstrated near-term need for such technologies.” A fairly innocuous and considerate line regarding the use for and applications of this cold plasma technology. IFLScience, however, sensationalizes the conclusions. “ The end result — one day, not too far away, we might all be carrying our own bug-killing machines,” says the end of the article. While this isn’t provably incorrect, it is unnecessary to the article in any way beyond attempting to bait people into sharing the story on the basis of the ‘wow’ factor.
Another interesting note is a comparison of advertisement and monetization on the two sites. IFLScience is absolutely filled with advertisements; on a single page, I counted 6 visible ads, three of which scrolled with me as I descended the page, and once I turned my adblocker on, it detected 33 advertisements or tracking scripts on a single web page. Conversely, ScienceBlog boasted no visible ads, and my adblocker only caught 5 potential tracking requests (This page on Medium has 13 blocked ads and scripts). It should come as no surprise that an organization has an interest in profiting, but their penchant for clickbait, which is almost certainly fueled by a desire for more clicks for ad revenue, could be seen as a potential conflict of interest.
This is nothing new, however. IFLScience has been accused in the past of perpetuating misleading information for the sake of clicks. The site was also given the “Worst Clickbaiter of 2018” award by the Facebook page Stop Clickbait.
However, for all my critiques of IFLScience, I cannot call them unsuccessful. ScienceBlog boasts around 8,000 likes on Facebook, while IFLScience is, at time of this article, sitting at over 25 million likes. The question becomes is it better to reach a smaller audience with more substantive information, or a larger audience with looser or broader information? Any objective answer is far above anything I can claim to be capable of, but each person is capable of making a subjective decision on the matter.
In the end, neither blog is single-handedly destroying or saving ‘science’, but it is important to be cognisant of biases when reading articles such as these online. The internet is too broad and wild of a medium to be defined by a single site, no matter how popular.
