Eugene Snyder

Nov 19, 2024 | nature.com | S. Sundar |Eugene Snyder |Mengqi Liao |Junjun Yin |Jinping Wang |Guangqing Chi

Social media have enabled laypersons to disseminate, at scale, links to news and public affairs information. Many individuals share such links without first reading the linked information. Here we analysed over 35 million public Facebook posts with uniform resource locators shared between 2017 and 2020, and discovered that such ‘shares without clicks’ (SwoCs) constitute around 75% of forwarded links. Extreme and user-aligned political content received more SwoCs, with partisans engaging in it more than politically neutral users. In addition, analyses with 2,969 false uniform resource locators revealed higher shares and, hence, SwoCs 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. Findings suggest that the virality of political content on social media (including misinformation) is driven by superficial processing of headlines and blurbs rather than systematic processing of core content, which has design implications for promoting deliberate discourse in the online public sphere. Over 75% of links to news shared on Facebook during the election seasons of 2017–2020 were forwarded without the sharer first clicking on them. Extreme and user-aligned political content was shared more, aiding the spread of partisan misinformation.