Clickbait, where video titles and thumbnails exaggerate or misrepresent content, reduces user trust, wastes attention, and promotes misinformation on video-sharing platforms. Detecting Bengali clickbait remains challenging because publicly available multimodal datasets are limited. To address this gap, we introduce BanClickThumb, a curated dataset of 7,147 Bengali YouTube thumbnail-title pairs from five content domains, annotated by ten annotators with high agreement (Cohen's Kappa: 0.83-0.93). Using this dataset, we benchmark text-only, image-only, and multimodal approaches. Among unimodal models, BanClickTextFormer (XLM-RoBERTa) achieves 0.82 accuracy, while BanClickImageFormer (SwiftFormer) reaches 0.68. Our proposed multimodal model, BanClickFusionFormer, combines ViT and XLM-RoBERTa through intermediate fusion and achieves the best accuracy of 0.84. Error analysis shows that dense thumbnail text, figurative language, and culturally specific slang remain challenging. Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of multimodal fusion for Bengali clickbait detection and provide a publicly available benchmark to support future research on low-resource multimodal content analysis.
Clickbait content on video-sharing platforms poses a significant challenge to information reliability, yet progress in automated detection has been constrained by the lack of large-scale, high-quality multimodal datasets. We present YTClickbait21K, a human-annotated YouTube clickbait dataset comprising 21,238 videos collected from 40 channels across 29 countries, covering diverse content categories such as news, entertainment, education, and gaming. Each sample includes structured metadata (title, description, engagement statistics) along with associated thumbnail images, enabling comprehensive multimodal analysis. To ensure annotation quality, every video was independently labeled by three annotators using a standardized decision framework that incorporates textual, visual, and cross-modal consistency cues, with final labels determined through majority voting. The dataset exhibits substantial inter-annotator agreement (k=0.65), confirming reliable labeling despite the inherent subjectivity of clickbait detection. By combining scale, annotation rigor, and multimodal richness, this dataset provides a robust benchmark for developing and evaluating machine learning models, facilitating research in cross-modal semantic understanding, and advancing automated content moderation systems.
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.