Clickbait is often characterized by phrases like “you will never believe this”, “sensational”, or other unverifiable assertions intended to arouse the curiosity of internet users.

The term clickbait can be defined as material put on the internet generally, or on social media in particular, in order to attract attention and encourage visitors to click on a link to a particular web page by over-promising or misrepresenting with a headline or image, or in combination.

The strategy is for a website to obtain as many page views as it can from attention-getting headlines. Most websites use page views or unique visitors as a measure of success, and advertisers pay accordingly.

Facebook and Google help people discover content online, but publishers are constantly challenged by changing algorithms. They must find a formula by which the story they want to promote is seen and clicked by as many users as possible. Very often, the formula for clickbait changes, but the attention-grabbing headline never goes away.

Clickbait is one of the easiest ways for a publisher to lose its audience. After being deceived once, smart readers will hesitate to read a story from the same publisher in the future.

Trolling represents a taxonomy of behaviours that are impersonal, irrelevant, and unsolicited, a widespread phenomenon involving real persons, and, very often, harm, which varies by context, culture, impact, motivations, and tactics. Generally speaking, trolling describes strategies employing multiple techniques, both technical and psychological, with hidden intentions, mostly to provoke a desirable comportment.

With mythological and piscatorial roots, trolling is used nowadays to enhance multiple types of behaviour, often seen as inappropriate or undesirable, from deviant behaviour to forms of comedy. From an etymological point of view, there are some ambiguous explanations of the term that cannot frame the current use of the word, even though its significance is the same – following a person in order to cause her to act according to the intentions (set as objectives) of the troller.

Even though trollers are persons whose behaviour is intentional, including for their own amusement, trolling is defined as the art of deliberately, cleverly, and secretly pissing people off, using dialogue. If the behaviour of the trollers transposes into negative words or syntagms, trolling could become hate speech.

The spread of trolling is particularly facilitated by computer-mediated communication, where anonymity, freedom, and lack of control permit rapid contact in online mediums, but trolling is perpetrated within traditional communication channels, too. The media and Internet researcher Judith Donath describes trolling as a malicious and deliberately destructive lie.

Whitney Phillips distinguished between forms of trolling, according to which some trolling is incredibly aggressive, and meets the legal threshold for harassment. Other forms of trolling, for example “Rickrolling”, are comparatively innocuous; some trolling is persistent, continuing for weeks or even months, and some is ephemeral, occurring once and then never again.

In a post-truth world, this term refers to a theory, a fact, an explanation, or an idea that does not take into account the existing evidence and is presented as being true. Alternative facts are used in parallel with a true, widely accepted theories or statements. In many cases, the phrase refers to remarks that directly or indirectly deny an actual fact.

Avoiding the truth, presenting it in a distorted way or omitting information altogether are actions that have been around for quite a long time, not only in literature (e.g., George Orwell’s novel 1984), but also in politics and in the public space. Recently, the phrase gained notoriety after a counsellor to US President Donald Trump, Kellyanne Conway, used the term alternative facts in January 2017 during an interview, in order to uphold a false claim made by the press secretary, Sean Spicer, regarding the number of people who attended President Trump’s inauguration. In his statement, he talked about the largest gathering ever to witness an inauguration, both in person and around the world. This was actually a lie, or an alternative fact, as it was presented, because looking at aerial photographs of Trump’s and Obama’s  inaugurations, it is clear that the crowd at Trump’s was nowhere near as large as the crowd at Obama’s.

Alternative facts can signify more things. First, the term can be used to describe a statement or a remark that is known to be false and that is intentionally presented as true. Second, the term can designate something incorrect that has been accepted as accurate. Thirdly, as strange as it sounds, it also refers to facts that don’t exist, but they could. Similar to fake news, “alternative fact” can be seen as an oxymoron. A fact is an uncontested truth, something for which one can find pieces of evidence, whereas an alternative fact would contradict this definition. Recognizing alternative facts can be difficult because they are usually camouflaged as accurate information, or incorporated into a set of messages that are actually true. Thus, the alternative fact isn’t spotted as being false and, if presented convincingly, it can be problematic to distinguish it from the facts. Like other types of fake news, alternative facts are also a useful propaganda tool and a way of spreading false information meant to influence public opinion and to misinform or disinform the people.

Professionalization of journalism and editorial independence influenced the rise of newsworthiness and news selection in the late 19^th century.

Newsworthiness is one of the principles for evaluating events by those inside the newsroom, depending on which journalists decide what is important, interesting, or attractive enough to be presented to the public as news. The evolution of the concept of newsworthiness has shown that it is determined by a set of criteria known as news factors and news values.

News factors represent the characteristics of an event depending on which journalists evaluate and select the news. But news factors alone do not determine the newsworthiness of a story if a news worker does not allocate a value to it.

News values represent the estimation of the relevance of a news factor, which is determined by values such as timeliness, proximity, prominence, consequence, conflict, oddity, human interest, impact, or scandal.

Both practitioners and theoreticians agree that the news selection process implies judgements made according to, among other criteria, the professional standards of news workers, the organizational structure, the economic conditions, the events, the news actors, the clarity of a story, or access to the events. Furthermore, other considerations can be taken into account to describe newsworthiness, such as political importance, economic or social effects, or the interest of the audience. 

Debunking is a type of fact-checking that targets incorrect and misleading claims and widely held opinions, relevant to a community. As compared to other types of sources triangulation, debunking is a process interested in disinformation, misinformation, and viral hoaxes that may have as sources and as disseminators not only public figures, but also private individuals, online trolls and fake accounts on social media.

Debunking misinformation starts as an operation identifying an untruth or a myth that tends to become viral and may have adverse effects on a community. A debunking team uses fact-checking instruments to verify whether the piece of information is, in fact, misleading and to determine the real story behind the viral content.

A debunking publishable piece, as a presentation of correct facts, involves four components, with four different foci: (1) the debunking team presents the fact – stating what is true; (2) they warn about the myth – mentioning the misinformation only once at this stage; (3) they explain the fallacy – showing why the misinformation is wrong; and (4) the debunking team presents the fact again – stating the truth for the second and last time.

The aim of the debunking process is to warn communities and correct misleading information, erroneous claims, false rumours, or modified photos or videos.

Verification is at the core of the journalistic standards and values and makes the difference between professional media content and other content. While decades ago it was common to let content be verified for accuracy after publishing it, currently, in the post-truth era, checking the accuracy of already distributed content is perceived as a necessity. From the perspective of countering disinformation, the literature differentiates between verification and fact checking based on timing – verification precedes publication, while fact checking comes afterwards. Statements made by politicians, officials, or other prominent actors in the public sphere are fact-checked by professional journalists. However, the two terms are often used interchangeably, argue experts, recalling that the concept and the job title were introduced by Time magazine in the 1920s in New York, when a group of staffers was hired to check the accuracy of the content gathered by reporters. It is “the application of verification that enables the act of fact checking”, experts conclude, and both are components of the debunking process. Decades ago, post-publishing debunking on a large scale would have seemed unimaginable, as correction and right to reply were seen as the last tools in ensuring accuracy.

The Verification Handbook identifies several categories of items to be verified for user-generated content, images, and videos. Four major aspects should be checked: (1) Provenance – is this the original piece of content? (2) Source – who uploaded the content? (3) Date – when was the content created? And (4) location – where was the content created? The Handbook also points to a mix of three factors that can strengthen the practice of verification, which refers to basic journalistic abilities: “1. a person’s resourcefulness, persistence, scepticism, and skill; 2. sources’ knowledge, reliability and honesty, and the number, variety and reliability of sources a reporter can find and persuade to talk; 3. documentation”. In the post-truth environment, professional journalism returns to its roots by putting verification back at the heart of the journalistic process to counter disinformation without amplifying it. The abundance of information requires the use of new modernized tools and approaches, such as digitalization and automation, but essentially journalism remains “the discipline of verification”, as the American Press Institute says, while accuracy remains at heart of any Ethics Code.

Social media is flooded with information and journalists hardly have time for cross-verification or triangulation (getting confirmation from more than two sources), a study conducted in Swedish newsrooms shows, finding that digital tools are a “vital” solution “to change the newsroom culture related to verification”. Another study tested and confirmed the efficiency of semi-automated tools that assist journalists in validating the trustworthiness of certain social media content. The practice of verification is entering a new stage of digital transformation.

Viralization is a term widely used in connection to social media, to describe online diffusion of content through shares by users: a result of collective behaviour. The term is based on a metaphor, explaining content diffusion by analogy with a contagious virus. While all viruses and illnesses are to be avoided, online viralization may be damaging for the public if misinformation or conspiracy theories are distributed online, but it can be helpful if, for example, a warning about an imminent danger is spread, as in a natural disaster, or if a piece of investigative journalism reaches a wider public. The Cambridge and Merriam-Webster dictionaries do not include the term as such, while “viral” is defined as quickly and widely spread or popularized especially by means of social media, with its derivate “go viral”. The Cambridge Dictionary refers to viral marketing/advertising as the spread of information about a product or service, mainly on the internet. Originating in pre-social media times, the concept of viral marketing turned to viral journalism, seen as “the strategy and tactics to promote quality media stories on the internet in order to gain maximum exposure and sharing”, a phenomenon different from clickbait. Although perceived as organically spread, experts argue that algorithms incentivize content, and can reflect manipulative techniques.

Research on social platforms allows for a closer look at viralization. One study about memes discovered that contagion is affected by social reinforcement (a notion similar to social proof) and homophily. If a meme spreads early on beyond the boundaries of a community of similar accounts, it has a greater chance to become viral and widely known. Yet, most memes are trapped inside a community and spread among similar accounts and are less viral. Another study, on what types of content are more viral, showed that strong emotions lead to physiological arousal, which drives virality – a result close to the hypothesis suggested by French social psychologist Gustave le Bon. Better knowledge of what makes content viral can be used to control the spread of dangerous messages and communicators in distributing public interest messages better. Scientists studied collective behaviour before the internet and social platforms became part of our lives. In 1895 Gustave le Bon published Psychologie des foules, in which he talked about the impulsivity, mobility and irritability of groups of people that can be persuaded to act with one mind and become “barbarians”. More refined theories of social interaction discuss imitative tendencies and collective behaviours. In the 1960s, for example, Stanley Milgram created an experiment on the street, to see how many people look up, if some other people look up – and it worked. The result was labelled “social proof”.

The question of responsibility is important when it comes to harmful manufacture of influence, weaponization of viral content, and misinformation behind viral marketing – conclusions of the Virality Project (at Stanford University) The project analysed Plandemic, a slickly-produced video exploiting pseudoscience and conspiracy theories and an illustration of how influencers can be manufactured. Derived from medical pathology, the metaphor is at risk of losing its credibility mostly for medical reasons. Searches for “viral” in its figurative meaning significantly dropped during the Covid-19 pandemic, as people returned to using the original medical term. Experts asked whether it was time to retire the natural virality of content and to consider the term just “a metaphor for the spread of misinformation”, which would put the focus on someone’s responsibility and accountability for mass sharing. A computer virus is a “disguised”, “hidden”, “apparently innocuous” logic, run to perform “a malicious action that propagates by infecting”; when defining viralization, one can also think of the hidden aspects of the so-perceived organic spread of information.

Media and information literacy (MIL) is a key term defined as knowledge, understanding, and experience of various media forms. As a stage of a more complex process, knowledge therefore means more than being initiated into a certain field, a stage of a process involving an interrelated set of competencies, doubled by critical thinking.

There are two parts of the MIL structure which need to be considered: on one hand, media and information, on the other hand, literacy, both of which have enriched their meanings in light of recent technological and societal developments. Media and information syntagma may include a wide range of formats, whether it is text, audio, audio video or multimedia, as well as various forms of content, either informative, entertaining, or interactive, and therefore produced by journalists, communicators or even by the user himself. The second term, literacy, enriched its meaning with an understanding approach; the simple acknowledgement of a certain piece of information will be insufficient to define the term. In a complex environment, media and information literacy is referred to as a combination of competencies: knowledge, skills and attitudes. As indicated, MIL also involves capabilities of actively interacting with the information and/or the media content, at least in the form of an active reception of the message: watchdogging the watchdog by critically processing the content.

Passive exposure to information might be the opposite of MIL. In conjunction with the digital word, MIL competencies, as inventoried by the UNESCO guide, will consist of: searching, critically evaluating, using content wisely, and contributing with specific forms of interaction. Conceptually, MIL can be classified in terms of core and subsidiary skills; the first category can be split in three others: (1) access/retrieval of media and information; (2) evaluation/understanding of MI; and (3) assessment and evaluation, organization and synthesis. According to the UNESCO guide, MIL core skills refer to: (1) access, (2) evaluation/understanding and (3) use. The subsidiary skills refer to: (1) identify need/express/search/locate, (2) analyse/induction/deduction (understand)/process, and (3) apply/learn/ethics/communicate/reproduce/produce. From the purpose perspective, MIL is defined as an essential dimension of moral and civic education, which plays a crucial role in democratic societies. In UNESCO’s view, MIL covers competencies that enable people to critically and effectively engage with information, but not only with information, as this field has been highly challenged and widened by technology. The Council of Europe refers to MIL as being composed of Information Literacy and Media Literacy, along with ICT and Digital Literacy.

Shareworthiness is a term used in the academic literature since 2015 or so to indicate a characteristic of online content that spreads rapidly on social networks. Yet, diffusion of news was studied before the introduction of the share button on platforms used for blogging or for social networking – this is, before user-generated content acquired a share-ability characteristic, due to the technological innovations linked to the share function.

In communication studies, the diffusion of major news events, such as the assassination of U.S. President J. F. Kennedy or the Challenger space shuttle disaster, has been a research topic since the 1960s. Researchers have found that information about major news events tends to spread in a matter of hours to reach most citizens in a given area. The excitement and emotional involvement are so high that even strangers share the news they have just learned from radio or TV. Yet, most news is shared only in small and extremely small circles. Research on the diffusion of news indicates that salience, “the degree to which a news event is perceived as important by individuals”, is an important factor in shareworthiness. Salience can be signalled in the way news is packaged by journalists, with bold headlines or with the breaking news label. When it comes to the content of the news, salience is related to what journalists and academia call newsworthiness features: if a celebrity is involved (prominence), if the news affects the audience in some way (human interest and consequences), or if it has local relevance (proximity). Other factors that influence the diffusion of news are situational variables, represented by immediate access to mass media or to interpersonal networks.

As compared to mainstream media, communication platforms have a business model that eliminates gatekeepers and at the same time supports sharing and vitalization of user generated content. Social media users can share news content from mainstream newsrooms, alongside content that mimics news and entertainment from various sources, and there is no editor to decide if the content is worth sharing. The content available on platforms is now so diverse that more than half of digital audiences report social media as a regular news source. Research into the diffusion of information has shifted its focus online. A recent study on shared news content identifies the following shareworthiness elements: proximity (either spatial or cultural), high positivity or high negativity, conflict, and human interest (the latter, depending on the social media under discussion). Another article studying a health campaign adds to the criteria for shareworthiness unusualness and useful information, and a combination of graphics and text. Novelty and emotional appeal are also characteristics of viral false information. For hyper-partisan news (including conspiracy theories), shareworthiness is tied to proximity, conflict, and human interest. While shareworthiness (what online users find interesting) is linked to newsworthiness (what journalists believe their audience would find interesting), research on offline and online information diffusion indicates that other elements are also important: extreme emotional involvement, novelty, the packaging of the informational content, the social media platform (Twitter users behaving differently from Facebook users), and individual characteristics, such as polarization on a social issue and a bias towards a certain type of content (science related content or conspiracy theories, for example).

Image search is a basic fact-checking tool for information found on web sites and on social media. Many newsrooms rely on social media for information from conflict zones and for breaking news about natural disasters, such as an earthquake, or human-caused disasters, such as a terrorist act. User generated content is not a reliable source for news and every piece of information has to be verified before it is used as journalistic material. Basic image search includes reverse search with Google, or with add-ons like RevEye, which uses four search engines with complementary capabilities, to identify the source and the context of an image. Reverse search can be used with snapshots from a video clip, too. Another technique is the analysis of a file’s metadata. Images and videos online are not free to use – journalists have to ask for permission and, eventually, sign an agreement and compensate the owner of the image. Asking permission is a good opportunity to ask for the original file. Social platforms delete metadata, such as the time and the place a picture is taken, to protect privacy, but these data are crucial in establishing the authenticity of a picture or a video. There are several online tools to verify metadata, including InVid and Image Verification Assistant.

Moving on to analysis of the elements in a photograph or video, journalists verify if there is a logical link between what the image shows and what the text claims it shows. Verification elements include type of clothing, buildings, and natural features, like a lake, the sea, mountains, and type of light and weather. With the help of online maps, sun calculators, weather reports and street views, journalists can verify if a picture or a video was made at the time and in the place, and depicts the action, the author claims. More sophisticated verification methods include the use of multiple sources for the same event or process, as was the case with the 2021 US Capitol attack, the 2022 killing of an American-Palestinian journalist, and the Muslim detention camps in China.