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tonyPick [soylentnews.org] writes:

There's a report over at IFL Science discussing research which shows that the bulk of news links shared on social media have never been clicked [iflscience.com].

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.
...
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.

In keeping with the spirit of the study the article is titled Marijuana Contains "Alien DNA" From Outside Of Our Solar System, NASA Confirms, and Yackler also have a summary [yackler.ca] under the title Scientists say giant asteroid could hit earth next week, causing mass devastation. Look forward to seeing both of those stories doing the rounds over the next week.

Also the Washington Post [washingtonpost.com] has more:

Worse, the study finds that these sort of blind peer-to-peer shares are really important in determining what news gets circulated and what just fades off the public radar. So your thoughtless retweets, and those of your friends, are actually shaping our shared political and cultural agendas.

“People are more willing to share an article than read it,” study co-author Arnaud Legout said in a statement. “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.”

The original paper is available [inria.fr], and provides information on the data collection method and analysis of the way news articles are distributed over social media.

Original Submission