Most people don't click on social media links. Here's why that's bad

Just about everyone’s experienced a scenario like this: you read a highly-nuanced article on a topic you find interesting. You then decide to share it on Facebook. Within minutes, a Facebook friend leaves a comment arguing with the premise of the article, and it’s immediately obvious that this person hasn’t actually read the piece in question.

In fact, the vast majority of social media users will interact with content without actually clicking through and consuming it. One study from Columbia University found that 59 percent of links shared on social media aren’t even clicked on. Data collected from Hubspot found that “there is no correlation between retweets and clicks.”

So what does this really mean for how we absorb information on social media? And how are we impacted by the commentary that social media users will often add when they’re sharing a link?York College political science professor Nick Anspach wanted to answer these questions, so he devised an experiment to find out what information is retained when social media users see a post but don’t click through to the source article.

I interviewed Anspach about his results and whether social media has generated a net negative effect on how we monitor current events.