Introduction

Welcome to my very scientific analysis of fake news titles, as I go on a quest to create fake fake news. This investigation follows my journey of analyzing the length of news article titles and their subjects to create a fake news article of my own. If you wish to see the process, scroll down. If you wish to see the news article, (title was created using data, article was written by a professional journalist that just happens to have the same name), please click here

Goals

Discover how to make the optimal fake news title, or basically, what makes a fake news article good?

Checklist:

  1. How long are the titles? How short/long do they need to be to capture your attention?
  2. What words do they use? What topics do they talk about?

By analyzing a sample of ~7900 headlines, I will attempt to answer these questions.

Data

Here is a short sample of data if you want to scroll through, sorted by the amount of Facebook likes they garnered.

Breaking Down the Data

Investigation 1: Outsmarting Our Short Attention Span

First step of our journey into creating our own fake news title is figuring out the the length of the title, which is VERY IMPORTANT. If it’s too short, you won’t be able to clickbait people into the article, but if it’s too long, people won’t even read it, which is not ideal.

First, we calculate how many characters are in each header! Here’s a small sample of some of the shortest titles, and how effective they were for getting Facebook likes:

OH NO NOT LARRY THE CAT :((((

Anyways, let’s get a better representation of this data, shall we?

By looking at the graph, it is clear the length of the news articles should be between 47-84, as those seem to perform the best.This data is supported by the fact that mean length of titles is around 67 characters. I mean, usually if everyone’s doing it… you should do it too right?

Regardless, that settles it! The ideal fake news title must be around 67 characters.

Investigation 2 - The Almighty Power of Words