Detect clickbait with Machine Learning - http://clickbait.pythonanywhere.com/

What is Clickbait?

• Clickbait is a fancy headline written to grab attention of generation that needs instant gratification
• Clickbait is an acknowledgement that anything that needs to be done to move the revenue, ad, CTR needle forward - will be done.
• Here is an interesting blog on why clickbait is so popular - link
• And another that talks about the psychology of clickbait - link
• My personal opinion is - that this form of writing like many other bublbles is just a trend, will die down soon. Until then - we will keep trying to find a way to seperate genuine news from baity articles. :)
• Facebook’s effort to curb clickbait - News Feed FYI:FB

Science

• The demo is a text classifier that determines weather the headline is a clickbait.
• The clickbait corpus consists of article headlines from ‘BuzzFeed’, ‘Upworthy’, ‘ViralNova’, ‘Thatscoop’, ‘Scoopwhoop’ and ‘ViralStories’.
• The non-clickbait article headlines are collected from ‘WikiNews’, ’New York Times’, ‘The Guardian’, and ‘The Hindu’.

Web Service

• The idea to have a simple interface to allow people to be aware and rather surprised - to how many news articles they read in a day are based on appealing to your dopamine - Link to the demo again - clickbait detector
• This is a hobby project to get the idea out there - I will someday work on a chrome plugin to get it to highlight all the news that one might read as baity or safe

Future

• If the tool reaches a significant audience. I would be happy to wrap it in a AWS lambda function and call it from a chrome extension- which looks for articles on google news, facebook etc. - for a more significant usage.
• If you think so too - let me know at @shubhamkalra27

My thanks to

• Training data has been used from this study - data posted here
• Good people at pythonanywhere.com
• Machine learning tutorials by Jose Marcial Portilla on Udemy.