A new study of 35 million news links circulated on Facebook reports that more than 75% of the time they were shared without the link being clicked upon and read
Maybe they are just aware of clickbait bullshit? Make headlines deliver on the payload of the article.
I don’t read 90% of the articles because they’re mostly crap.
Right? Do you expect me to click on 90% of articles?
Social media is a filter. I’m using it to figure out what is worth clicking on.
This article is about sharing links without having read the content, not just scrolling past or commenting without reading first
Edit: a more accurate headline would be
Facebook users probably won’t read beyond this headline before sharing it, researchers say
At first the author states:
The findings, which the researchers said suggest that social media users tend to merely read headlines and blurbs rather than fully engage with core content, appeared today (Nov. 19) in Nature Human Behavior. While the data were limited to Facebook, the researchers said the findings could likely map to other social media platforms and help explain why misinformation can spread so quickly online.
This implies all social media users. Later it mentions sharing information.
If I cared , I would read the paper. I think the author didn’t do a very good job from headline on.
I know they think it might generalize to other platforms, but there’s little evidence to say so, and I doubt the percentage is nearly as bad on other platforms, especially Lemmy (which is the only social media I use, so the only thing relevant to me and many others here)
There’s likely also a high percentage of people who form opinions about and comment on headlines without reading the content, but that’s not what this paper measured
“No balls, you won’t,” researchers suggest.
I wonder how many of us will read this article lol (I haven’t).
Here’s the direct link to the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-02067-4 And they shared their code used to query the data here: https://github.com/geocomplexity/SwoCMetaURL/blob/main/Code.md
