Read me first?
There’s a viral story that viral stories are shared by people who don’t actually read them. I saw it again today in a tweet from Newseum Insititute
59% of links shared on social media are never actually clicked, according to a Columbia University study. Which means the majority of people don’t actually read an article before they share it. So here’s our PSA: Read it before you share it.
— Newseum Institute (@NewseumInst) February 15, 2018
If you search for the study it doesn’t take long to start suspecting that the majority of news sources sharing this study didn’t read it first. One that at least links is from the Independent, in June 2016.
The research paper is here. The money quote looks like this, from section 3.3
First, 59% of the shared URLs are never clicked or, as we call them, silent.
First, 59% of the shared URLs are never clicked or, as we call them, silent. Note that we merged URLs pointing to the same article, so out of 10 articles mentioned on Twitter, 6 typically on niche topics are never clicked
That’s starting to sound a bit different. And more complicated.
What the researchers did was to look at bit.ly URLs to news stories from five major sources, and see if they had ever been clicked. They divided the links into two groups: primary URLs tweeted by the media source itself (eg @NYTimes), and secondary URLs tweeted by anyone else. The primary URLs were always clicked at least once — you’d expect that just for checking purposes. The secondary URLs, as you’d expect, averaged fewer clicks per tweet; 59% were not clicked at all.
That’s being interpreted as if it were 59% of retweets didn’t involve any clicks. But it isn’t. It’s quite likely that most of these links were never retweeted. And there’s nothing in the data about whether the person who first tweeted the link read the story: there certainly isn’t any suggestion that person didn’t read the story.
So, if I read some annoying story about near-Earth asteroids on the Herald and if tweeted a bit.ly URL, there’s a chance no-one would click on it. And, looking at my Twitter analytics, I can see that does sometimes happen. When it happens, people usually don’t retweet the link either, and it definitely doesn’t go viral.
If I retweeted the official @NZHerald link about the story, then it would almost certainly have been clicked by someone. The research would say nothing whatsoever about the chance that I (or any of the other retweeters) had read it.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »