Wednesday, July 13, 2016

Sharing in Ignorance

This morning, a friend shared this article: Scientists say giant asteroid could hit earth next week, causing mass devastation.

You should really read it.

No, really, read it. Go ahead, I'll wait.

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Back now? Good. So if you actually read the article, you would see it was just a ruse to get you to click. What the article is actually about is a study finding that people often share articles without having read them first. Specifically, 59% of links on social media have never been clicked on:
To verify that depressing piece of conventional Internet wisdom, Legout and his co-authors collected two data sets: the first, on all tweets containing Bit.ly-shortened links to five major news sources during a one-month period last summer; the second, on all of the clicks attached to that set of shortened links, as logged by Bit.ly, during the same period. After cleaning and collating that data, the researchers basically found themselves with a map to how news goes viral on Twitter.

And that map showed, pretty clearly, that “viral” news is widely shared — but not necessarily, you know, read. (I’m really only typing this sentence for 4 in 10 people in the audience.)
This is especially concerning, given that the study also found that most clicks to news stories were made on posts by regular users, rather than the news organizations themselves. Since the links had to originate with the news organization first, this means that the people who start the share cycle generally don't read the article either. A person starts a viral post without really even knowing what they're sending out.

Even more concerning when you realize how misleading and even incorrect headlines can be. In fact, both of the articles linked in this post have misleading headlines - one purposefully and the other due to a misunderstanding of the results. That is, the study didn't find that 6 out of 10 people don't click on links; it found that 6 out of 10 link shares don't get clicked on. That's a lot of misinformation floating around.

And when you think of topics that can have important ramifications on, say, policy, voting decisions, and so on, it's important to know what an article actually says and whether the headline is accurate. Because if it isn't, and you share it anyway, many people who see your post will make a conclusion just based on the headline. And they may pass it on to others who do the same thing.

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