Recent studies have uncovered a disturbing trend. A very large percentage of Social Media users are sharing stories without actually reading them, let alone doing any sort of fact-finding as to the validity of the article. Because of this, satirical sites and unscrupulous companies just trying to get views for ad revenue are benefitting. The Science Post, a satirical news site published a story filled with “lorem ipsum” text with the headline, “Study: 70% of Facebook users only read the headline of science stories before commenting.” Then, as if to validate the sarcasm and satire, 46,000 people went on to share the post.

Whether the phenomenon is a result of users trusting their “friends” to have fact checked it or not, this trend is on the rise. The Science Post experiment isn’t the only evidence of this problem. Computer scientists from Columbia University and the French National Institute have

Conducted a study titled “Social Clicks: What and Who Gets Read on Twitter?” The study concluded that 59 per cent of links shared on Social media have never even been clicked on by the person who shared it. This was after analysing 10 million clicks for a random selection of news stories on Twitter originally posted by news organisations. The Chicago Tribune  surmises that this means that the thoughtless retweets from internet users are actually what is shaping our shared political and cultural agendas. The study’s co-author, Arnaud Legout explains, “People are more willing to share an article than read it. 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”.
Clickbait is now becoming sharebait. Viral stories may not even be read and ideas can be passed along that have no factual backing whatsoever. Instead of creating satire, lets create real news that people want to read. And instead of sharing things, read them and learn about it before passing it on to your friends, family, and social networks.

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