What If Facebook And Twitter Made You Read An Article Before You Could Share It?
▻http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2017/01/15/what-if-facebook-and-twitter-made-you-read-an-article-before-you-could-share
One of the most fascinating statistics about how we consume and share news online revolves around how few of us actually read the news articles we share – we see an interesting headline and click the “share” button to blast it out to all our friends and followers without ever reading further. In fact, upwards of 60% of links shared on social media were posted without the sharer reading the article first.
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Many news outlets today use JavaScript-powered beacons embedded in their articles to track how far readers scroll through each article, the time they spend on each section of the article and other micro-level assessments of engagement.
Today all of that data is typically just fed back into a statistics portal and used for ad marketing, but the same tools could easily be turned around to assess whether a reader
A) never read the article at all,
B) skimmed just the lead paragraph quickly,
C) skimmed the first half of the article quickly,
D) scrolled quickly down the full length of the article, but scrolled too fast to really take in any of the details,
E) scrolled quickly, but paused several times to read sections in more detail,
F) read the entire article in detail or
G) some combination of the above.
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In fact, in its proposal to combat “fake news” Facebook has proposed offering precisely such public indicators on news and other shared links to reflect that one of its fact checking organisations has disputed the contents of the article.
Thus, Facebook is tracking how much time users spend reading each post/link and the technology is or shortly will be in place to assign and display “truth” scores for each post/article, meaning Facebook has all of the pieces in place to assign a public “engagement”
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Perhaps, then, the biggest benefit would be forcing the world’s online citizenry to become more information literate, to read and think about the information they consume before blindly sharing it with the planet and force us all to spend a bit more time thinking about what we read online and a bit less time acting as illiterate carrier pigeons.
#meta
