A new study of 35 million news links circulated on Facebook reports that more than 75% of the time they were shared without the link being clicked upon and read

      • Kintarian@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Oh, ok. It seemed they were talking about people only reading the headlines, then sharing with people who only read the headlines.

      • Kintarian@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        At first the author states:

        The findings, which the researchers said suggest that social media users tend to merely read headlines and blurbs rather than fully engage with core content, appeared today (Nov. 19) in Nature Human Behavior. While the data were limited to Facebook, the researchers said the findings could likely map to other social media platforms and help explain why misinformation can spread so quickly online.

        This implies all social media users. Later it mentions sharing information.

        If I cared , I would read the paper. I think the author didn’t do a very good job from headline on.

        • I know they think it might generalize to other platforms, but there’s little evidence to say so, and I doubt the percentage is nearly as bad on other platforms, especially Lemmy (which is the only social media I use, so the only thing relevant to me and many others here)

          There’s likely also a high percentage of people who form opinions about and comment on headlines without reading the content, but that’s not what this paper measured

    • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Right? Do you expect me to click on 90% of articles?

      Social media is a filter. I’m using it to figure out what is worth clicking on.

    • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      And there are a bajillion of them, and all completely random. You could read for the rest of your life and not get through a single day’s worth of shared articles. That said, you really should read something before sharing it. That part is just stupid.

  • masterofn001@lemmy.ca
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    1 month ago

    If it makes anyone feel any better, the researchers didn’t click the links either.

    To determine the political content of shared links, the researchers in this study used machine learning, a form of artificial intelligence, to identify and classify political terms in the link content.

    • otp@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      You’re lucky if researchers read the sources they cited beyond the abstract! Lol

  • AmidFuror@fedia.io
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    1 month ago

    I share Onion headlines without reading the articles. The headline is usually about 90% of the laugh.

  • Stalinwolf@lemmy.ca
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    1 month ago

    Me attempting to take the time to read twenty poorly formatted articles per day, broken up into fourteen paragraphs each and seperated by what I assume are intended to be hundreds of intrusive ads and completely diverging from what the headline baited me into thinking this ad (er… article…) was about in the first place:

    • pivot_root@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      We would like to use cookies for personalization and other data, and we promise that’s not just a sugar-coat for using cookies to track your browsing history and find the right advertisements to show you. If you agree, click this big green flashing button. If you disagree, click this link indistinguishable from the rest of the paragraph and scroll through our 378 partners to choose which ones you feel strongly enough about to disable. Oh, and when you reload the page, please do it again because we also included ourselves in that list and can’t save your preferences if you don’t let us use cookies.

      The web is awful without adblock and cookie banner block.

    • Rimu@piefed.social
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      1 month ago

      it’s actually about how often posts are shared without reading, not how often people glance at a headline.

    • ShareMySims@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      Yup. If I actually want to read an article and it isn’t a site I already know isn’t too bad, I’ll right click copy the link and put it in the archive machine to get to a readable version of it. I really don’t think they can blame us at this point for not wanting to click every shitty clickbait headline, nor is it necessarily a bad thing that people aren’t (especially people who don’t use adblock and just accept cookies to make the shit go away. With the quality of reporting on most of these sites, they’re definitely not getting a good deal)