According to a new study, six in 10 people who share a post from a news organization actually read the article first; the rest are just blindly sharing. Oh, are you still here? Thought you may have been tuned out.
The study, performed by computer scientists at Columbia University and the French National Institute, found that 59 percent of the links shared on social media had not been clicked on before, The Washington Post reports. According to the study's co-author, this means people are happy just reading the summary and sharing the information rather than digging into the whole thing.
"People are more willing to share an article than read it," said study coauthor Arnaud Legout, a research scientist at Inria and the study’s co-author. "This is typical of modern information consumption. People form an opinion based on a summary, or summary of summaries, without making the effort to go deeper."
According to Legout, researchers collected two sets of data from tweets containing a link to five of the major news outlets during a one-month period last summer and another of a set of shortened links that were sent out by Bit.ly. They also found that most of the links shared came from the users rather than the actual news source, which were usually a little older.
The Washington Post attributes this data being caused by “the rise of sharebait and the general BuzzFeedififcation of traditional media.”
Read more at The Washington Post.
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