Over the past decade "Click Bait" and "Fake News" authors have steadily grown more and more clever at grabbing our attention, utilizing tactics such as celebrity rumors, sexual triggers, violence, and most prevalently politics. Independent blogs and self proclaimed news websites have gotten smart at using the the power of rumors and fake news to move ahead a personal agenda. Many people wonder; would Hillary have won had almost a million people not read that Pope Francis had endorsed Trump? Probably not, yet we have now seen click bait since the birth of the internet, is it possible to tell the difference between a real article and a fake news or click bait article?
Using Amazon Mechanical Turk we asked strangers to come up with a plausible News Headline for a shooting in their community accompanied with headline picture. We then combined the crowdsourced made up news headlines with real headlines of gun violence and produced a survey to see if other people could tell which were real and which were fake. Below are some responses we got from strangers, click on each image to see which headlines were most believable.
