BanClickThumb: A Multimodal Dataset and Transformer Fusion Benchmarks for Clickbait Detection in Bengali YouTube Videos

Clickbait content on video-sharing platforms poses a significant challenge to information reliability, yet progress in automated detection has been constrained by the lack of large-scale, high-quality multimodal datasets. We present YTClickbait21K, a human-annotated YouTube clickbait dataset comprising 21,238 videos collected from 40 channels across 29 countries, covering diverse content categories such as news, entertainment, education, and gaming. Each sample includes structured metadata (title, description, engagement statistics) along with associated thumbnail images, enabling comprehensive multimodal analysis. To ensure annotation quality, every video was independently labeled by three annotators using a standardized decision framework that incorporates textual, visual, and cross-modal consistency cues, with final labels determined through majority voting. The dataset exhibits substantial inter-annotator agreement (k=0.65), confirming reliable labeling despite the inherent subjectivity of clickbait detection. By combining scale, annotation rigor, and multimodal richness, this dataset provides a robust benchmark for developing and evaluating machine learning models, facilitating research in cross-modal semantic understanding, and advancing automated content moderation systems.

In-the-wild Bengali scene text recognition is largely unmeasured: existing resources target handwritten documents or constrained sign-board parsing, report only aggregate edit-distance metrics, and evaluate either conventional OCR or VLMs, never both on the same in-the-wild data. To address this gap, we introduce BANGLAWILD, a benchmark of 2,535 Bengali scene text images, each paired with a verbatim gold transcription, two categorical axes, four diagnostic attributes, and an orthographically standard form where the in-image text deviates from canonical spelling. We evaluate fifteen VLMs and three conventional OCR systems under three prompting strategies, fine-tune 6 open-source models with LoRA, and complement edit-distance metrics with an LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation. Our results reveal a persistent gap in which larger models within the same family do not outperform smaller ones. Our fifteen-class error taxonomy shows that visual mis-recognition accounts for ~60% of errors in the strongest systems, while conjunct-related errors contribute under 2%, challenging a long-standing assumption in Bengali OCR research; the same visual dominant profile also holds across architectures, including the one conventional baseline that reads Bengali reliably. Prompt language mainly affects cross-script drift and LoRA reduces catastrophic failures in weak models without lifting the ceiling on already competent ones. Code and data will be publicly released.

The spread of hate speech (HS) across different social media platforms (SMPs) poses a major concern for online safety and ethical moderation. Automatic detection of HS remains a challenging task, especially in under-resourced languages like Bangla, due to cultural context, implicit expressions, and informal linguistic patterns. This study aimed to expose the crisis of Bangla HS detection systems by diagnosing how and why benchmark-trained models fail to identify implicit, context-dependent HS. Six architectures (FastText + CNN, FastText + LSTM, FastText + BiLSTM, BanglaBERT, BanglaBERT + CNN, and BanglaBERT + BiLSTM) were trained on benchmark datasets (about 75,000 posts) and a merged multi-source dataset (about 120,000 posts), then externally validated on an annotated dataset (about 200 posts) collected from Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, labeled as HS and non-HS, where HS was further categorized as explicit and implicit. BanglaBERT achieved an F1-score of 91.4% on benchmark datasets but declined to 75.3% on the external set and 63.4% for implicit HS involving sarcasm and emojis. The accuracy of FastText + CNN dropped from 78.0% to 51.2% under similar conditions. Emoji-aware preprocessing improved implicit HS detection by up to 12%, whereas emoji removal caused a notable decline in performance (F1: 0.75 to 0.63). Frequent misclassifications in politically charged or satirical comments revealed over-policing risks. This study not only exposes the generalization crisis due to implicit, culturally embedded, and emoji-laden expressions but also underscores the need for developing adaptive, emoji-aware, and culturally grounded frameworks that ensure ethical moderation while preserving freedom of expression. Findings of this study provide insights for researchers, SMPs, and policymakers to design more context-sensitive HS detection systems for low-resource languages.