What If Facebook And Twitter Made You Read An Article Before You Could Share It?

A Belgian pigeon, similar to the prized Belgian carrier pigeons that can be worth hundreds of thousands of euros. (SISKA GREMMELPREZ/AFP/Getty Images

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.

Credits: Forbes Magazine