How should we deal with clearly misleading or false headlines?
In the past few months, I have noticed an uptick of popular posts with headlines that are clearly misleading or false. The Telegraph and Daily Mail are especially guilty of them, but not exclusively. Fortunately, there are usually one or two top comments calling out their falsehoods, but not everyone reads the comments, and certainly not everyone reads the content, especially if they are paywalled. I will just point to a few examples:
One in 12 in London is an illegal immigrant when in reality the original report includes tourists and Londoners with second homes.
Pakistanis up to four times more likely to be behind grooming. Reading the headline, some may reasonably think that Pakistanis are responsible for 80% of grooming cases, but the reality is in a specific type of child sexual abuse, Pakistanis are overrepresented up to 4x (depending on time period chosen) vs their overall population, quite different from what the headline suggests.
White executive excluded from meetings by Indian boss wins £40k payout. The judge explicitly said that her being "White British" is irrelevant, she's treated less favourably because she's not from the family. It's a case of nepotism and favouritism, not racism. But many people assume otherwise.
Record numbers of migrants living in Britain are jobless with more than 1.6 million unemployed or 'economically inactive' people costing taxpayers an estimated £8billion. The top comment very kindly points out why it's a bollocks headline.
Anyway, I think this sub needs an approach to deal with clearly misleading or false headlines. The easiest solution is to ban sources that are most guilty of it, but I don't think that's productive and will probably lead to accusations of censorship/bias. The other solution is use a "Misleading" flair for popular posts (maybe 500+ upvotes) but there needs to be a way for the mod team to correctly label them without too much work or bring accusations of bias from certain circles. I don't have a clean solution right now so I figured writing a meta post about this can help crowdsource some ideas on combating misleading or false headlines.