From headlines to hashtags: How social media rewrites the news narrative

Abstract

This paper is a quantitative analysis of how social media rewrites news on consciously creating a headline, emotional headlining, and hashtagging. Based on the content analysis of 100 posts on Facebook, Twitter (X) and Instagram, the study checks the statistical dependence between the style of the headline (clickbait, question-based and informative) and the emotional tone (positive, negative, neutral) on the number of likes, shares, and comments added by users. Chi-square tests and descriptive statistics were used to determine a trend of audience interaction. Findings reveal that clickbait-type headlines highly surpassed other variations in measure of engagement and framing negativelyemitively turned out to perform especially well on Twitter. The presence of a hashtag also showed the non-linear character of the relation between it and engagement, and one or two hashtags created the most activity on all platforms. These observations prove that the performance-like logic of social media is making editorial less and less, as analytics-driven user behaviour and platform possibilities are becoming more and more determining factors. The research suggests the necessity to review the principles of journalism through the prism of the algorithmic benchmarks that shape the news distribution and intake currently.