Emotion-Aware Clickbait Attack in Social Media

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Hasan, Syed Mhamudul, Soumik, Mohd. Farhan Israk, Shahid, Abdur R.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Hasan, Syed Mhamudul
Soumik, Mohd. Farhan Israk
Shahid, Abdur R.
author_facet Hasan, Syed Mhamudul
Soumik, Mohd. Farhan Israk
Shahid, Abdur R.
contents Clickbait is characterized by disproportionately high emotional intensity relative to informational content, often reinforced by specific structural patterns. However, current research considers clickbait as a static textual phenomenon characterized by linguistic patterns and structural cues. Additionally, existing detection systems primarily rely on surface-level features of clickbait. This paper introduces an emotion-aware clickbait generation attack, where stylistic transformations are used to optimize emotional impact. We propose an emotion-aware framework based on the Valence-Arousal-Dominance (VAD) space to model the emotional dynamics underlying clickbait generation for optimal user engagement. To simulate realistic attack scenarios, we align clickbait headlines with semantically similar social media posts using Sentence-BERT and generate multiple stylistic rewrites via Large Language Models (LLMs). Building on this, we define a Curiosity Gap (CG) function that computes clickbait's headline variation to the current post to quantify how emotional activation will contribute to user curiosity and evade the existing system found on social media. Experimental results demonstrate that emotion-aware stylization significantly degrades the performance of state-of-the-art classifiers, leading to misclassification rates of up to 2.58% to 30.63% on the base system.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_27369
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Emotion-Aware Clickbait Attack in Social Media
Hasan, Syed Mhamudul
Soumik, Mohd. Farhan Israk
Shahid, Abdur R.
Computation and Language
Social and Information Networks
Clickbait is characterized by disproportionately high emotional intensity relative to informational content, often reinforced by specific structural patterns. However, current research considers clickbait as a static textual phenomenon characterized by linguistic patterns and structural cues. Additionally, existing detection systems primarily rely on surface-level features of clickbait. This paper introduces an emotion-aware clickbait generation attack, where stylistic transformations are used to optimize emotional impact. We propose an emotion-aware framework based on the Valence-Arousal-Dominance (VAD) space to model the emotional dynamics underlying clickbait generation for optimal user engagement. To simulate realistic attack scenarios, we align clickbait headlines with semantically similar social media posts using Sentence-BERT and generate multiple stylistic rewrites via Large Language Models (LLMs). Building on this, we define a Curiosity Gap (CG) function that computes clickbait's headline variation to the current post to quantify how emotional activation will contribute to user curiosity and evade the existing system found on social media. Experimental results demonstrate that emotion-aware stylization significantly degrades the performance of state-of-the-art classifiers, leading to misclassification rates of up to 2.58% to 30.63% on the base system.
title Emotion-Aware Clickbait Attack in Social Media
topic Computation and Language
Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.27369