Newspapers have a habit of using Facebook posts to entice readers to click on an article. Such posts are often more subjective than the article itself, and this undermines the news brand’s credibility, according to the doctoral research by linguist Elena Savinova.

Which media outlets did you study?

“My research focused exclusively on British news media. I examined two quality media outlets—the BBC and Sky News—as well as the two most popular tabloids: the Daily Mail and Metro.”

What was your research question?

“Which kind of outlets use subjective language in their Facebook posts and what effect adding those subjective phrases would have on readers. An example from Metro: in an online article about the meeting between Elon Musk and Donald Trump during last year’s Charlie Kirk memorial, they posted the phrase ‘Let’s just say it was not exactly a bromance revival’ on Facebook.” That’s an interesting choice of words for a news outlet. Very subjective, because it contains an implicit evaluation.”

How do you define “subjective”?

“I presented sentences to native British speakers and asked them to rate how subjective they found those sentences. An example of a very objective text is: ‘London is the capital of Great Britain.’ An extremely subjective one is: “The show was absolutely terrible.”

I then trained a computer model to distinguish subjectivity from objectivity and counted how often the various media outlets used subjective language.

BBC and Sky News turned out to use just as much subjective language in their news reports as on Facebook, but the Daily Mail and Metro included more subjective phrases in their social media posts. Sometimes they also added an emoji, which is, of course, very subjective. So it seems to be a conscious choice on the part of those editorial teams.”

To entice readers to click on the article?

“I haven’t researched that specifically, but based on previous interviews with newsmakers, engagement does seem to be the goal. In a follow-up study, I looked at what subjectivity does to the credibility of a news outlet and whether it makes people want to keep reading. I tested variations in phrasing that I had devised myself on a reader panel. More subjective phrasing didn’t make people more interested in reading on, but even quite subtle shifts in subjectivity made them see the news outlet as less credible.

So you might use subjectivity to attract or engage people on social media, but it doesn’t necessarily make them want to keep reading, and it can come at a cost to your credibility. And in an age when users consume news all day long across various platforms, there’s a chance they’ll trust your outlet less if they feel it’s too subjective. So if you want to be taken seriously as a news source, it’s probably better not to include too much subjectivity in your texts.”

Another conclusion you reached is that not all readers are equally good at distinguishing between facts and opinions.

“No. Many people couldn’t recognize the subjective cues I’d included. Opinions can easily be confused with facts, and that doesn’t seem right to me if your goal as a news outlet is to inform your readers. What was striking, by the way, was that people who read more books in general were better at this. Reading books helps improve your ability to distinguish between facts and opinions.”

So?

“So it’s important to encourage children to read. I know that reading skills are declining in the Netherlands and throughout the rest of Europe. In the fight against fake news and misinformation, I think it could also be useful to teach children the difference between a fact and an opinion from an early age.”