Majority share on social media without reading the story first

Author Moonshot.news

Published on: 26/11/2024

Most people share stories on social media without reading them first, a new study shows. Around 75% of forwarded links on Facebook were made by people who had not read the information first. The researchers analysed over 35 million public Facebook posts between 2017 and 2020, and discovered that ‘shares without clicks’ (SwoC) 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”, they write. 

The researchers say that the findings suggest that the virality of political content on social media (including misinformation) is driven by superficial processing of headlines and blurbs.

The research is published in the online journal Nature Human Behaviour. The researchers are S. Shyam Sundar, Pennsylvania State University, Eugene Cho Snyder, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Mengqi Liao, University of Georgia, Junjun Yin & Guangqing Chi, Pennsylvania State University and Jinping Wang, University of Florida.

A US-study by Pew Research Center shows that a minority of avid TikTok posters create the vast majority of content on the site. Most TikTok-users post seldom, if at all. Instead they are using TikTok primarily to view and consume content made by others.

TikTok, with more than 1.5 billion monthly active users, is the fifth most popular social media platform in the world behind Facebook (3.049 billion monthly active users), YouTube (2.491 billion), WhatsApp  (2 billion) and Instagram (2 billion), according to social media marketing company Sprout Social.

Key findings in the Pew report:

• A small share of users are responsible for producing the majority of TikTok content. The top 25% of US adults on TikTok by posting volume produce 98% of all publicly accessible videos from this group. This is in line with the Center’s previous research on Twitter users, which found a similar ratio of highly active users creating the majority of content on the platform.
• The typical TikTok user posts seldom, if ever. About half of all US adults on the site have never posted a video themselves. And the typical user has not added any information to the “bio” field on their account.
• The posting behaviours of younger adults do not stand out dramatically from other age groups. Users ages 18 to 34 are much more likely than their older counterparts to use TikTok in the first place. But around half of these younger users have ever posted on the site – similar to the share among users ages 35 to 49.
• Users who have posted videos on TikTok are more active on the platform in general than non-posters. Posters typically follow more users, have more followers themselves, are more likely to have filled out their account bio and are somewhat more likely to find the content of their “For You” page extremely interesting.
• TikTok users are more likely than not to find their “For You” page interesting. TikTok is defined by its algorithmically curated “For You” page, and users generally like the content the algorithm serves them. Some 40% of users say this content is either extremely or very interesting to them, far more than the 14% in total who say it is not too or not at all interesting.

Trust in media is record-low while trust in information on social media is increasing according to two US surveys. For the third consecutive year, more adults have no trust at all in the media (36%) than trust it a great deal or fair amount. Another 33% have “not very much” confidence, a survey by Gallup shows. 

A Pew Research study shows that people under 30 are now nearly as likely to have a lot of or some trust in information from social media sites (52%) as from national news organisations (56%).

The Pew survey shows most age groups remain far less likely to trust information from social media sites than from national and local news organizations. But the youngest adults are an exception.

Adults under 30 are now nearly as likely to have a lot of or some trust in the information that comes from social media sites (52%) as from national news organizations (56%). More young adults (71%) express trust in information from local news outlets.

For all other age groups, trust in information from social media sites remains lower than trust in both local and national news organisations. The gap is especially large among the oldest. Just 22% of those ages 65 and older say they have at least some trust in information from social media, compared with 61% who trust national news organisations and 78% who trust local news outlets.