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In reply to the discussion: Ocasio-Cortez: House Democrats too old to understand income inequality [View all]G_j
(40,367 posts)(I had just stumbled upon this silly click bait, and it makes a point.)
http://www.sci-techuniverse.com/2018/07/marijuana-contains-alien-dna-from.html?m=1
It is 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. 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 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 persons followers, suggesting that social media users are more into sharing content than actually clicking on and reading it.
People are more willing to share an article than read it, the studys co-author Arnaud Legout said in a statement, Washington Post reports. This is typical of modern information consumption. People form an opinion based on a summary, or a summary of summaries, without making the effort to go deeper.
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