[ghaff]

Pretty much any university in the country would have written the headline in exactly the same manner substituting their institution's name. And, yes, anyone who interprets it differently is doing so in bad faith or just is pretty unaware of US university names generally.

[Zababa]

> And, yes, anyone who interprets it differently is doing so in bad faith or just is pretty unaware of US university names generally.

I think most people outside of the US are unaware of US university names. I could name 5 to 10, and that's because I spend a lot of time reading american media and american-centric websites like HN.

[genocidicbunny]

What is your point? People interpret things in bad faith all the time, but that doesn't detract from my point about the A/B testing. The test wouldn't care why someone arrived at a given interpretation, its only measuring how many people arrived at which one as a proxy for engagement. The motivations people have are somewhat irrelevant.

And we know this sort of thing happens all the time with less scrupulous media outlets. Media outlets surely test specific headlines with the intention of attracting a certain bias depending on the outlets own leanings.