Social media users probably won’t read beyond this headline, researchers say | Penn State University
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In an analysis of more than 35 million public posts containing links that were shared billions of times on the social media platform between 2017 and 2020, the researchers at Penn State found that around 75% of the shares were made without the posters clicking the link first. Of these, political content from both ends of the spectrum was shared without clicking more often than politically neutral content.

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

  • NeoToasty
    19•3 days ago

    Because Facebook isn’t treated seriously like a news format, a lot of my friends don’t go on Facebook to read the news, and neither do I. Most of the time, articles are only posted to drive a certain narrative, that’s how Facebook works.

    And yes a lot of the time I don’t read a news article past the headline. Mostly is because I’m bombarded with “PLZ ACCEPT COOKIES AND WE GIV U NO CHOICE TO DISAGREE” some of the time. The screen grays out. Some news outlets blur some of the article. I’m nagged to subscribe and shit.

    Why the fuck would I then want to read it? I’ll only read what I’m interested in, I don’t want to read an entire article of “oops, the world sucks today” or “Trump is fucking things up again” or “uh you’re going to hell” and whatever. Why would I want to read that in-depth?

    • @[email protected]English
      9•3 days 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.

    • RimuEnglish
      3•3 days ago

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

    • @[email protected]English
      2•3 days 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)