Betteridge's Law of Headlines

Betteridge's law of headlines observes that any news headline ending in a question mark can usually be answered "no." It is named for technology journalist Ian Betteridge, who articulated the pattern in 2009, though versions of the observation predate him.

The mechanism is specific rather than mystical. A headline is a claim the publication stands behind; a question is not a claim. Phrasing a story as "Does X Cause Y?" lets a publisher gesture at a sensational conclusion its reporting cannot support, while remaining technically accurate — the piece only asked. If the evidence were solid enough to assert, the headline would assert it. The question mark does the work a stronger word cannot do without becoming a false or unsupportable Exhaustive Claim, and its presence is a reasonably honest signal that the underlying story is speculative, thin, or a denial dressed as a headline.

As a heuristic for how much weight to give a story before opening it, this earns its keep at essentially no cost to check. As a literal law it is weaker than it sounds: it is a joke about editorial incentive rather than a statistical finding, its apparent hit rate helped by Selection Bias in which headlines people bother to cite, and plenty of question-mark headlines resolve "yes" or "it's complicated." Treat it the way its own Plausible Mechanism suggests — a real incentive producing a real pattern, worth suspecting rather than trusting, and not falsifiable enough to be a genuine law of anything.

The incentive it names — implying more certainty than a story earns — is not specific to journalism, and shows up anywhere a title or subject line is optimized for attention rather than accuracy, including Search Engine Optimization framing built purely to bait a click.