I immediately tested the premise in my newsreader, and saw that modern clickbait gives us headlines like "How many weeks till Blandars Gnob is released?", So I added that it must be a binary question.
> A 2016 study of a sample of academic journals (not news publications) (…) were more often answered "yes" in the body of the article rather than "no".
> A 2018 study of 2,585 articles in four academic journals in the field of ecology (…). Of the yes/no questions, 44 percent were answered "yes", 34 percent "maybe", and only 22 percent were answered "no".
> In 2015, a study of 26,000 articles from 13 news sites on the World Wide Web (…) divided into 20 percent "yes" answers, 17 percent "no" answers and 16 percent whose answers he could not determine.
> You misread. Betteridge's law says it can be "no"...
That doesn’t make sense. Of course Betteridge didn’t mean “it can be answered with “no”, but also “yes””. The point is that you can answer “no” instead of reading the article.
Either way, I was responding to ultropolis’ assertion—not Betteridge’s—by citing the studies which already suggest it to be false.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
> A 2016 study of a sample of academic journals (not news publications) (…) were more often answered "yes" in the body of the article rather than "no".
> A 2018 study of 2,585 articles in four academic journals in the field of ecology (…). Of the yes/no questions, 44 percent were answered "yes", 34 percent "maybe", and only 22 percent were answered "no".
> In 2015, a study of 26,000 articles from 13 news sites on the World Wide Web (…) divided into 20 percent "yes" answers, 17 percent "no" answers and 16 percent whose answers he could not determine.