You Won't Believe Our Results! But They Might: Heterogeneity in Beliefs About The Accuracy of Online Media Preliminary Draft Mario Luca∗ Kevin Mungery Jonathan Naglerz Joshua A. Tuckerx January 2, 2020 Abstract \Clickbait" media has long been espoused as an unfortunate conse- quence of the rise of digital journalism: faced with new monetary incen- tives driven by digital advertising, journalists are forced to chase \clicks" at the expense of high quality news. But little is known about why readers choose to read clickbait stories. Is it merely curiosity, or might voters think such stories are more likely to provide useful information? We provide a first test of this question with a survey experiment conducted in Italy, where a major political party, the Five Star Movement, enthusiastically embraced the aesthetics of new media and encouraged their supporters to distrust legacy outlets in favor of online news. We offer respondents a monetary incentive for correct answers, and thus manipulate the relative salience of the motivation for accurate information. Surprisingly, this in- centive increases differences in the preference for clickbait; older and less educated subjects become even more likely to opt to read a story with a clickbait headline when the incentive to produce a factually correct an- swer is higher. In contrast to other explanations for the rise of low-quality online media, our model suggests that a politically relevant subset of the population prefers clickbait media because they trust it more. ∗Sciences Po Paris, Economics Department,
[email protected] yPenn State University, Political Science Department,
[email protected] zNew York University, Politics Department, Center for Social Media and Politics,
[email protected] xNew York University, Politics Department, Center for Social Media and Politics,
[email protected] 1 1 Utility and Media Choice A central parameter in the study of political media is the process by which the public selects media to consume.