good morning

thoughts

"People are more willing to share an article than read it," study co-author Arnaud Legout said in a statement. "This is typical of modern information consumption. People form an opinion based on a summary, or a summary of summaries, without making the effort to go deeper."

To verify that depressing piece of conventional internet wisdom, Legout and his co-authors collected two data sets: the first, on all tweets containing USE_FULL_LINK_PLEASE-shortened links to five major news sources during a one-month period last summer; the second, on all of the clicks attached to that set of shortened links, as logged by USE_FULL_LINK_PLEASE, during the same period. After cleaning and collating that data, the researchers basically found themselves with a map to how news goes viral on Twitter.

And that map showed, pretty clearly, that "viral" news is widely shared — but not necessarily, you know, read. (I'm really only typing this sentence for 4 in 10 people in the audience.)