Study says most news links shared on social media are never read

Studies have proven that social media is now the single largest source for people to access news. But those statistics are mostly based on the number of shares. Now another study has found that Social media is now more popular than six in 10 people do so without ever having read them.

Researchers claim that these mindless shares are shaping our collective political and cultural opinions.

The study, undertaken by Columbia University and French National Institute, revealed that viral news is widely shared across the social media site, but is not necessarily read. It says that as much as 59 percent of links shared on social media have never been clicked on.

"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.' a statement," Arnaud Legout, who co-authored the study, said.

The study involved two data sets - one that contained Bit.ly-shortened links to five major news sources in a one month period, and the second that contained all the clicks attached to the first set.

Collating these two sets allowed the researchers to form a type of map to plot how news goes viral on Twitter.

The study also says that most of the shares on Twitter and Facebook, are actually re-posts of links already shared by regular users.