It's a big news, shocking, yet amazing, and entertaining to the world. But
unluckily, it has nothing to do with aliens stoners melding with Earth's
plants. But, since you're now reading, you'll almost definitely be concerned about
this research that looked into the clicking and sharing activities of social
media users reading content (or not) and then sharing it on social media.
I have noticed long ago that several of our followers will happily like,
share and offer an opinion on an article - all without ever reading it. We're
not the only ones to notice this. Last April, NPR shared an article on their
Facebook page which asked "Why doesn't America read anymore?” The joke, of
course, is that there was no article. They waited to see if their followers
would weigh in with an opinion without clicking the link, and they weren't
disappointed.
We've been hoping for a chance to try it ourselves, and
this seemed like the perfect opportunity. Yackler had
some fun with the same article and managed to fool a bunch of people.
A group of computer scientists at Columbia University
and the French National Institute looked into a dataset of over 2.8 million
online news articles that were shared via Twitter. The study found that up to 59
percent of links shared on Twitter have never actually been clicked by that
person’s followers, suggesting that social media users are more into sharing
content than actually clicking on and reading it.
“People are more willing to share an article than read
it,” the study’s co-author Arnaud Legout said in a statement, Washington Post reports. “This is typical of modern information consumption.
People form an opinion based on a summary, or a summary of summaries, without
making the effort to go deeper.”
This study looks into the psychology behind what makes
people want to share content. Research conducted by The New York Times Customer Insight Group looked into what motivates people to share
information. Just under half of the people asked in the survey said they share
information on social media to inform people and to “enrich” those around them.
Conversely, they found 68 percent share to reinforce and project a certain
image of themselves – in a sense, to “define” themselves.
In the words of one participant from the study: “I try
to share only information that will reinforce the image I’d like to present:
thoughtful, reasoned, kind, interested and passionate about certain things.”
It also raises the question of whether online media is
just a massive “echo chamber”, where we all just like pages and viewpoints that reinforce our
own beliefs and are not interested in information for the sake of information.
Even the algorithms of social media sites mean that individuals or pages
that you tend to click on, like, or share – which are most often the
articles or viewpoints that you agree with – will more frequently turn up
on your News Feed.
As a user of online media, you’re probably quite aware
of this.
Take a look at any comment on social media pages,
including those, of course, on the IFLScience Facebook page. It’s particularly noticeable on the more “emotive” and
controversial of subjects; think climate change, GMOs, vaccinations, aliens,
and a lot of our articles on marijuana, where the top comments often repeat or
question something that is fairly explicitly in the article, but not the
headline.
Just this week, our article about capuchins monkeys entering the stone age was met with many of the top comments
on the Facebook post pointing out they’ve done this for hundreds of years, despite
that being the first thing the article said if you read it. Although
from our analytics it's impossible to see which users did not click through to
the article yet shared it, there is fairly often a slightly fine discrepancy
between shares and page views which doesn't quite add up, especially on those
buzz subjects.
So, if you are one of the lucky few who managed to
click and read this article, we congratulate you! Although we do apologize for
the misleading headline. In the meanwhile, have fun sharing the article and
seeing who manages to chair a discussion on marijuana genetics, without ever
reading it.
