Will you read past this title? Probably not
If you’ve reached this part of the article, you’re in the minority. According to a research team led by Penn State in the United States, most people on social media share links to news content without reading it first. Did you receive the link to this article from a social media site such as Facebook? This means that there’s a strong likelihood that the person didn’t actually read it before sharing. That’s surprising – and concerning!
Sharing without caring
The researchers analysed over 35 million public Facebook posts shared between 2017 and 2020. The links included political content from groups ranging from very liberal to very conservative. They found that three out of four posted links were shared without a click, regardless of political stance. While the study was limited to Facebook, the team of researchers said that their findings are likely relevant to other social media platforms, too. The study was published in the journal ‘Nature Human Behaviour’. “It was a big surprise to find out that more than 75% of the time, the links shared on Facebook were shared without the user clicking through first,” corresponding author S. Shyam Sundar, professor of media effects at Penn State, commented in a news release. “I had assumed that if someone shared something, they read and thought about it, that they’re supporting or even championing the content. You might expect that maybe a few people would occasionally share content without thinking it through, but for most shares to be like this? That was a surprising, very scary finding.”
Living in a superficial digital age
By sharing without clicking, people may be unknowingly helping ruthless foes who want to spread discord and mistrust. “Superficial processing of headlines and blurbs can be dangerous if false data are being shared and not investigated,” Sundar explained. “If platforms implement a warning that the content might be false and make users acknowledge the danger in doing so, that might help people think before sharing.” So, the majority of us read news stories solely based on headlines and blurbs. But why do we share without clicking to begin with? “The reason this happens may be because people are just bombarded with information and are not stopping to think through it,” Sundar added. “In such an environment, misinformation has more of a chance of going viral. Hopefully, people will learn from our study and become more media literate, digitally savvy and, ultimately, more aware of what they are sharing.” Sundar has a possible solution to sharing without clicking. Social media platforms could require users to acknowledge that they have fully read the content before sharing.
Keywords
social media, headline, title, article, link, sharing, Facebook, click, content