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

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2024-11-19 21:00

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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.

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Research Springer Nature, Web page The URL will go live after the embargo ends

Journal/
conference: Nature Human Behaviour

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: Pennsylvania State University, USA

Funder: This research was supported by Social Media and Democracy Research Grants, awarded by the Social Science Research Council, with access to Facebook data via Social Science One (grantees: S.S.S., G.C., J.W. and J.Y.). The grants are funded by a group of charitable foundations including the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, the Democracy Fund, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Charles Koch Foundation, Omidyar Network and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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