Drei von vier Facebook-„Shares“ stammen von Personen, die die Geschichte nicht gelesen haben, insbesondere extreme Inhalte oder Inhalte, die eine bereits bestehende politische Haltung bestätigen. Die meisten (76–82 %) der ungelesenen geteilten Artikel stammen aus konservativen Nachrichtenquellen, wobei Liberale für 14,25 % der geteilten Inhalte verantwortlich waren, die sie nicht gelesen hatten.

I’ve linked to the news release in the post above. In this comment, for those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:

Sharing without clicking on news in social media

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-02067-4

Abstract

Social media have enabled laypersons to disseminate, at scale, links to news and public affairs information. Many individuals share such links without first reading the linked information. Here we analysed over 35 million public Facebook posts with uniform resource locators shared between 2017 and 2020, and discovered that such ‘shares without clicks’ (SwoCs) constitute around 75% of forwarded links. Extreme and user-aligned political content received more SwoCs, with partisans engaging in it more than politically neutral users. In addition, analyses with 2,969 false uniform resource locators revealed higher shares and, hence, SwoCs by conservatives (76.94%) than liberals (14.25%), probably because, in our dataset, the vast majority (76–82%) of them originated from conservative news domains. Findings suggest that the virality of political content on social media (including misinformation) is driven by superficial processing of headlines and blurbs rather than systematic processing of core content, which has design implications for promoting deliberate discourse in the online public sphere.

From the linked article:

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.

The authors posit that one of the reasons for the disparity is that the majority of links in their dataset come from conservative domains, but I would think that the pre-existing political makeup of users is a confounding factor here (i.e. Facebook users are much more likely to be conservative so one would expect both domains and SwoCs to be conservative more frequently).

On point might link to false assumptions (in a probably neglectable small scale):

> 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 […]

I might act atypical here and haven’t even been on facebook during said period. But I sometimes SwoCs because I’ve already read the story beforehand, so I see no need to click it again. Plus I sometimes copy links and read them in a more secure outside app or browser, not to give too much privacy infos to sites like Facebook, Twitter … Reddit, etc. And if I’m not mistaken, then that would count as SwoCs aswell, right? I know I’m a bit weird there, but still: SwoCs ≠ unread articles.

But nevertheless an interesting article/study*, thanks for the share therefore.

^(Haven’t read the study itself from front to end btw, so I better not dare to share this link … sorry. ;))