70% Of Americans Only Read Headlines Of Articles Before Sharing

If you clicked on this then congrats you are a part of the 30%. That being said WOW that is a small number. In 2014 a study came out saying that 41% (or 4 out of ten Americans) actually read an article before forming an opinion.

In 2018 another study came out saying 49% claimed to read articles, but that still meant about 6 out of ten people only look at the headlines before sharing an article.

What do the numbers look like now? Well, we have apparently gotten worse. A new study came out saying that only 70% of people read the articles. What is funny about this study in particular is that that article when actually clicked on is a fake with no info. This lead to some amazing findings we will get into later.

The New York post  went on to look more in depth and claims that the joke 70% number is actually a lot closer to correct than we think. They looked at a new study:

In an effort to suppress misinformation and knee-jerk retweets, the social-media company is testing a new feature that would ask users whether they’ve actually read the content they’re about to share.

A joint study between Columbia University and Microsoft in 2016 found that 59% of links shared on Twitter are never clicked. Those findings seemed to be confirmed by a fake story (the one mentioned earlier) with the alarming headline that 70% of Facebook users only read the headlines before commenting on the post. That story came from the fake news website 'The Science Post' which collected 127,000 shares for the article, but consisted of a fabricated headline and gibberish filler text!

In the end, while we aren't officially at 70% we are close, ranging anywhere from 59 - 68%. The moral of this story? Read the article!