I don't disagree that headlines matter. I don't think it's a good headline. But I was simply stating that I don't believe the headline was written in service of an alarmist agenda to use "misinformation" as boogeyman to push for moderation of private messaging platforms (as the GP stated). I believe it was just written to get more clicks. Even if the result is the same, the intent matters because we need to understand the intent in order to de-incentivize the behavior. (We also need to understand who actually writes the headlines, which the GP missed, which was my other point.)

Why would you assume the headline wasn’t written in service of pushing an agenda?

It can both be intended to get more clicks, and to push an agenda. In fact it’s reasonable to assume every headline is like this, since they must generally conform to the agendas of the publication and must be interesting.

Headlines are generally written by editors, not the authors. However at this point, why does that change anything?

These are two people working together on a single published piece.

If you goal is to de-incentivize a behavior, it seems odd to arbitrarily discount the motivation for that very behavior.

Why would you believe that? Copy editors don't spend a lot of time on each headline. Publication style guides for headlines aren't particularly ideological. Copy editors aren't like reporters, who narrowly focus on a single subject - whoever wrote this headline probably writes hundreds of headlines for articles across a vast array of subjects. To me, having worked at a newspaper (not the NYT of course) and having seen the way headlines get drafted, this is a case where the burden of proof is on you to show that whoever titled this piece wanted to imbue it with an anti-private-messaging agenda, rather than rattling off something that they thought was catchy using a few buzzwords that would draw the reader in.

> These are two people working together on a single published piece.

Copy editors (who write headlines at large news orgs) don't work with reporters on the content of the piece, only the style and grammar.

Copy editors are part of the organization.

If the organization has an ideological position, they will reflect it. It doesn’t take some special deep thought to do so.

It seems like you are working hard to make the case that these headlines are somehow random, or that bias takes a lot of work to coordinate.

That’s implausible. They are a result of the organizational culture as much as any other writing they produce.

Again, that doesn't reflect my experience working at a newspaper, where many other factors play a much stronger role in headline selection. Perhaps you're right and I don't see that deep-seated bias that's informing headline selections. Happy to continue this discussion elsewhere (should be easy to find my contact details based on my username) if that's something you're interested in.