3 in 4 Facebook 'shares' are by people who haven't read the story, especially the extreme stuff

A US analysis of over 35 million Facebook posts shared between 2017 and 2020 found that ‘shares without clicks’ - articles shared by people who haven't read the article they're sharing - make up around 75% of all forwarded links, and the proportion is even higher for extreme content or content that confirms users' pre-existing political stance. Most (76–82%) of the unread shared articles they studied originated from conservative news sources, while liberals were responsible for 14.25% of shared content they hadn't read. This suggests news that goes viral on Facebook often does so based on users' superficial interpretation of headlines and short blurbs, rather than the longer content they link to, the experts conclude, which has implications for the design of social media platforms if they wish to promote informed political discourse online.