The Prevalence of Dark Patterns in Polarized Online News. 

Dark patterns have become an ever-prevalent issue within the digital world. From banners soliciting users to enable cookies to malicious links embedded into the websites, users have previously been manipulated to unknowingly donate millions of dollars to political campaign funds solely due to dark patterns (Jellins, 2022).

 

Dark patterns are generally defined in academic literature as "Instances where designers use their knowledge of human behavior . . . and the desires of end users to implement deceptive functionality that is not in the user’s best interest" (Gray et al., 2018). Many existing studies have sought to examine specific individual elements of news websites, such as different types of ad-based dark patterns (Zeng et al., 2020) or the specific design of banners that solicit cookies (Soe et al., 2020).

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However, existing research regarding dark patterns has not attempted to link the political alignment of online news websites to the number of dark patterns that may be present. Thus, I will be researching the extent to which the political lean of the website impacts the number and type of dark patterns that are prevalent within a website to attempt to address the current gap in the literature.