Shares without Clicks

According to a recent Pew Research Center study, more than half of Americans get some, if not all, of their news from social media.

Jinping Wang, University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications Advertising assistant professor, and a team of researchers analyzed 35 million Facebook posts between 2017 and 2020 containing links. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/385945678_Sharing_without_clicking_on_news_in_social_media

Approximately 75% of the news links shared on Facebook are reposted without the users ever reading the content, researchers report. This finding helps to explain why misinformation spreads so rapidly—three-quarters of shared stories are circulated without any verification of their underlying facts.

They found that 42 billion shares-without-clicks accounted for more than three-quarters of all sharing activity. The researchers found that politically extreme content received significantly more shares without clicks than moderate content.

The majority of false URLs in their dataset (76-82%) originated from conservative news sites. Due to this, conservative users shared more false information (76.9%) than liberals users (14.3%). Partisan users shared unread material that aligned with their existing beliefs, an example of confirmation bias. Users are more likely to share unverified information that confirms their existing beliefs.

“The virality of political content on social media appears to be driven by superficial processing of headlines and blurbs rather than systematic processing of the core content,” the researchers write.