Sharing without Caring

Social media is our town square where we share and over-share our thoughts, feelings, and virtual lives. Increasingly, it has provided the soap boxes for our political thoughts, and the hallmark of success is those shared clicks. A new study of Facebook considers the phenomena of shares without clicks (SwoCs), meaning 

“users forward uniform resource locators (URLs) of news stories and other public affairs information to others in their network without clicking through and reading it first.”

In other words, we share without actually reading the article; we share without caring. Metaphorically, we snack on the news and frequently share those ultra-processed snacks with others, creating an obesity of “likes” and superficial knowledge without becoming informationally fit. (No more of the metaphor, I promise.)

Of course, an unintended consequence of the snacking is that we believe we know more than we do and that our views are widely held – another variation of the Dunning Kruger. New snacking is based on shortcuts (heuristic clues are the more formal sciency term) that allow us to skim rather than attend to information. 

Researchers analyzed four years of political news sharing to investigate the cues driving "sharing without clicking" (SwoC) on Facebook. They explored three key factors: content polarization, users' alignment with political content, and political affinity, while also examining whether SwoC is linked specifically to false information.

Polarized content, often sensational and dramatic, tends to catch attention quickly, prompting shares without clicks. Ideological alignment plays a significant role; we prefer headlines confirming our biases and aligning with our political views; they require less cognitive effort (thinking). And not reading the content allows misinformation to evade our consideration.

The data includes the user demographics, their digital behavior, and a - "political page affinity score" based on pages followed by users. [1] Humans manually identified eight thousand links as political or non-political. Each link was assigned a political affinity score based on the sharing patterns across the user groups. A training dataset created the algorithm, which analyzed 35 million links shared more than 100 times by Facebook’s US users. 

Is polarized content associated with SwoCs?

The more politically extreme the liberal and conservative content (, the more it was shared without clicks, compared with neutral content. Note: -2 is very liberal, 2 is very conservative, 0 is neutral

Does politically aligned content attract more SwoCs 

“We found a clear pattern suggesting that the more politically aligned a domain is to the user (closer to 0), the more likely it is shared without being clicked upon first. When we ran the same analyses on non-political content, similar patterns emerged, but the effects were weaker.”  

Are the political leaning of users associated with SwoCs?

Very much so! 75-77% of 56.4 billion shares from the top 4,617 domains across the political spectrum were made without being clicked upon. The highest numbers were from moderate liberals and conservative users, although, to be fair, when the percentages vary by 2.46% out of 75%, everyone across the political spectrum was sharing without caring. 

Is the SwoC phenomenon more apparent with false news?

Based upon third-party fact-checkers, “the absolute number of SwoCs was higher in conservative than in liberal political affinity groups” – “17.5 million SwoCs came from the very conservative group, 14 million from the moderately conservative group, 3.6 million from the neutral group, 3.2 million from the moderately liberal group and 2.6 million from the very liberal group.”

Before jumping to any conclusion regarding user intent, given that across the spectrum, all users’ SwoC a lot, the researchers believe the higher incidence of false news from the conservatives is due to a higher amount of false news, as defined by the fact-checkers, from conservative sites. These numbers may also be due to small, highly partisan, highly active groups on Facebook, as the researchers have previously identified on Reddit. You may agree or disagree with their conclusion. 

“I had assumed that if someone shared something, they read and thought about it, that they’re supporting or even championing the content. You might expect that maybe a few people would occasionally share content without thinking it through, but for most shares to be like this? That was a surprising, very scary finding.” 

- S. Shyam Sundar, Evan Pugh University Professor and Professor of Media Effects at Penn State

Should we actually be surprised that in the virtual world where attention is the prize, where the actual time spent on a page is between 10 and 20 seconds, we often share without clicking, share without caring? While I agree with the researchers that 

“This could potentially explain why it is so common for misinformation to spread so quickly via social media; the vast majority of news stories that are shared on these platforms are shared without deliberation, let alone confirmation, of the underlying facts.”

I do not believe this is because some of us are more “mindful” and thorough than others, although that does play a role. As the researchers note, SwoC may reflect an article previously read and now being shared; of course, reading the article does not indicate paying attention to what is being said – TLDR (too long, didn’t read) did not appear without reason. 

I suspect that much sharing without caring is virtue signaling that you are a tribe member. Of course, another term we might apply to virtue signaling is gossip, a means of social networking that has existed since we have grouped together. Gossip is a means of spreading information about reputations – deterring selfish behavior and rewarding cooperation. In a computer simulation, 90% of the digital agents became gossipers. And gossiping is more likely in tight-knit, low-mobility social networks. That used to mean small towns, but we now use the term echo chambers in digital worlds. 

Computers allow us to do stupid things much more quickly. Gossip serves an important social function and is unlikely to disappear, given its benefits and prevalence in simulations and real life. So, creating “more friction” to make simple sharing without clicking more difficult, as the researchers suggest, is unlikely to succeed. The answer lies in learning to better use the tool we call social media, and for many of us, that means turning it off. 

[1] Users were assigned to one of five groups — very liberal, liberal, neutral, conservative, and very conservative — based on their political page affinity score.

Source: Sharing without clicking on news in social media  Nature Human Behavior DOI: 10.1038/s41562-024-02067-4