It's
big news, set to shock, amaze, and entertain the world. But
unfortunately, it's got nothing to do with extraterrestrial stoners melding
with Earth's plants. However,
since you're now reading, you'll almost certainly be interested in this
research that looked into the clicking and sharing behaviors of social media
users reading content (or not) and then sharing it on social media.
We
here at IFLS noticed long ago that many 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.
Read
more here.