this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
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2024-11-11

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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

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours 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:

[–] thevoidzero 10 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

Psychologists say you came to comment section just because of that heading.

[–] johsny 7 points 15 hours ago

They’re goddam right!

[–] [email protected] 20 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 19 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 15 hours ago

Yeah, because I know this, and the research it self doesn't sound interesting to me.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

Upvoted without reading just to perpetuate the narrative.

[–] Valmond 4 points 22 hours ago

Can you tell me what the headline said? I never read those (either).

[–] [email protected] 15 points 20 hours ago
[–] Kintarian 65 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I don't read 90% of the articles because they're mostly crap.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

This article is about sharing links without having read the content, not just scrolling past or commenting without reading first

Edit: a more accurate headline would be

Facebook users probably won't read beyond this headline before sharing it, researchers say

[–] Kintarian 1 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 22 hours ago

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

[–] Kintarian 1 points 23 hours ago

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

[–] Anticorp 2 points 18 hours 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.

[–] TropicalDingdong 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Kintarian 3 points 23 hours ago

Politics, sensationalism, click bait, fear mongering. A lot of content is useless to me.

[–] mastod0n 17 points 22 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Doing everything out of the spite is the best reason. It's why I am going to outlive all my enemies and friends.

[–] Anticorp 1 points 18 hours ago

That does seem to be an effective strategy given all the spiteful old people in power these days.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 day ago

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

[–] [email protected] 8 points 22 hours ago

I didn't read beyond the title, but I did comment.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago (3 children)

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?

[–] pivot_root 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day 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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day 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)

[–] just_another_person 18 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Maybe they are just aware of clickbait bullshit? Make headlines deliver on the payload of the article.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

Users hate these media tricks to get attention. Number six will shock you!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago

"No balls, you won't," researchers suggest.

[–] pixxelkick 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Here's the direct link to the paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-02067-4 And they shared their code used to query the data here: https://github.com/geocomplexity/SwoCMetaURL/blob/main/Code.md

[–] SlippiHUD 4 points 1 day ago

This headline is barely even about the article. The blurb provides enough context to know what the content is about atleast.

But apparently most links on social media don't even do that.

It's accidentally proving its point, much like that meme where the paper on the inaccessibility of science is being denied by a paywall.

[–] small44 4 points 1 day ago
[–] vaper 4 points 1 day ago

I wonder how many of us will read this article lol (I haven't).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

In addition, analyses with 2,969 false uniform resource locators revealed higher shares and, hence, SwoCs [Shares without Clicks] 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.

Damn, never would've seen that one coming /s

[–] mlg 2 points 1 day ago

Jokes on you I read the summary which is totally enough to cover the actual content of the article with no lack of detailed information whatsoever.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 day ago

I don't click links specifically for this reason... Why would I feed surveillance machine for fake news slop paid by elites to shape my opinion.

Commom sense 101