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. Even when someone goes to the heroic and unusual lengths of actually reading an article before sharing it, they rarely make it beyond the first few paragraphs. These behaviors encourage click bait headlines and feed into the “fake news” epidemic. This raises the fascinating question – what if Facebook and Twitter forced you to read through an entire article before you were allowed to share it with others?
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.
In fact, Facebook already compiles several of these metrics as a way to fight clickbait, launching a number of algorithm changes over the last few years that take into account how long users spend reading articles they’ve clicked on through Facebook posts or those posts themselves. The company quietly uses these indicators to deprioritize shares and posts that most readers skip over or skim very quickly. In doing so, they allow the posts to be shared without any delays and display no visible indicators to users about the post, but internally tweak the post’s settings so that it will be less and less likely to appear in other users’ news feeds.
What if Facebook displayed these readership metrics as an actual visible “score” in the upper-right of each post or share that advertised to the world whether people viewing that post or clicking that link either A) immediately moved onward after reading just a few sentences (receiving a score of “red”), B) skimmed the top half of the article and returned (orange), C) skimmed all the way to the bottom and paused a few times to read portions in more detail (yellow) or D) read all the way to the bottom at a pace suggestive of the user actually spending the time to fully digest the piece (green). Facebook is already recording this data, so why not display it to end users?
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 organizations 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” score for each piece of content on its platform and to publicly display that score. When one of your friends shares a link to a news article, that share could be made to display an indicator showing how much time everyone across Facebook is spending with that article and a second indicator showing how much time people in your social group are spending engaging with it and how many people in your network have read it already.
Combining these three metrics – global engagement, your social circle’s engagement and penetration into your social circle – offers a powerful set of signals as to an article’s contentiousness and relevance. If an article is trending widely globally, but has not penetrated your social circle despite a number of your contacts having read the article, that suggests that something about that article is making it be rejected or of no interest to your circle. Conversely, something which is going viral within your friend group, but the rest of world appears to have little interest in could indicate that it is false or misleading or that it reflects something of niche interest to your community (for example a new feature in your favorite niche PC game).
Combining these indicators further, imagine that you spot an attention-grabbing headline in your news feed and you click on the share button to share it with all of your friends. Instead of instantly sharing with the world, a popup appears and tells you that most of the people sharing this article have not read it and that those who do spend a few moments to read through it abandon it before reading beyond the first paragraph or do not share it after reading it. That would likely give you pause and perhaps make you spend a few moments to at least skim the article to make sure it is what you thought it was.
Alternatively, imagine if Facebook required that you answer a short quiz about an article before you were allowed to share it and you were not allowed to share the link until you got the quiz correct? That would immensely reduce blind sharing and ensure that users spend the time to read and comprehend at a basic level the content they are sharing.
Yet, “frictionless sharing” is what the social web is built upon – making it easier and easier for anyone, anywhere to tell the world whatever is on their mind at the moment with a single click. Anything that impinges on this streamlined process and makes it even the slightest bit more difficult to share would have a substantial impact on the financial bottom line of the ad-driven social media world in which even a share of a “fake news” story generates revenue for them.
Putting this all together, what would we gain if users had to prove they had read an article before they were allowed to share it? In terms of “fake news” (false and misleading coverage) it is unclear whether such a process would really combat the spread of this news, since typically such coverage is written such that even if someone read the entire article they might still share it. Clickbait would likely be substantially impacted, since Facebook’s current approach of merely limiting the spread of such stories doesn’t address the root problem of allowing it to be posted in the first place. 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.
