Unchecked Sharing of Political Content Fuels Misinformation on Social Media

A new study published in Nature Human Behavior finds that most of the social media users share posts without reading and confirming the whole content. The analysis was made on 35 million Facebook posts and it was found that 75% of the users didn't engage with the post completely before sharing it. The aim of the study was to find out how and why people share posts on social media without reading them first. To investigate all of this behavior, the researchers took a dataset of 35 million URLs shared on Facebook from 2017 to 2020. The researchers focused on 4,617 domains from The New York Times, CNN, BBC, Fox News and their URLs during the four year period.

The research included two areas – the patterns of sharing content related to politics and sharing content without clicking on it or reading it completely. A machine learning classifier separates political content from non-political content with the help of keywords used in them. Different user behaviors from political views like neutral, liberal and conservative were analyzed to find if there was some connection between the political views of users and the content they share without reading it. Among all the URLs which were analyzed, 75% of them were shared without checking the full content and the trend was stronger in the content related to politics. The URLs which had incorrect or false content were also likely to be shared more than the content with correct and true information.

Users simply glance at the highlight, blurb and the news network the content was shared by and hit the share button which then spreads misinformation to other people too. The researchers also found that the content which had more politically extreme information was more likely to get shared without being clicked or read completely. Users shared the content which aligned with their political beliefs the most and that's why their shared content was biased. Conservatives share links five times more than liberals before completely reading them, and this shows a concerning trend about how social media users are engaging with posts.

The study has some limitations too like how the study was only done on the basis of aggregated data and not on individual behavior, and the study also just focuses on Facebook. If we need to know more about user behavior when it comes to sharing content without reading or clicking on it, we need to analyze different social media platforms as well as behavior of users individually and on different devices.

Image: DIW-Aigen

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