Betteridge’s law of headlines is an adage that states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not.
The law is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist who wrote about it in 2009.
thanks to @spizzat2@lemmy.zip for sending this in a different comment section
I’ve personally found that in all of these cases, if they know the answer is yes, telling people the answer is yes is far more interesting than asking a question over whether or not it could be yes.
The study on news articles mentioned in the article seem to match your observation, as it shows a slight bias towards ‘yes’.
Can Every Question Headline Be Answered “No”?
If the entire answer is “No.”, the article is just clickbait and didn’t need to be written. More often though it’s “No; but…” and there’s the subject of the article. Which, if you can sum it up in a sentence, would make a better title for the article than the question one.
