Why you can’t just read the headline
TWITTER will start cracking down on another common social media practice, as it fact-checks politicians and warns its users to be nice to one another.
Now, people who try to share articles without reading them first will be warned about their behaviour.
The company announced on (where else but?) Twitter that it would start nudging some users to read articles they’re about to share if they haven’t opened them in the Twitter app first.
Like Twitter’s warnings on things such as viewing some of US President Donald Trump’s tweets and the popup dialogues that have lectured users about being mean to one another, the app will only warn you about blindly sharing articles rather than stop you from doing it.
The new warnings are only a test at this stage and will only affect some users of the Android app.
Twitter’s app has a reader that uses the open-source Accelerated Mobile Pages technology to load pages quickly but particularly on news sites it can lead to a poorer reading experience, p , as p parts of an article may not load.
It’s not clear how or whether Twitter will police people who open links in their phone’s browser rather than on the Twitter app.
They’ll presumably have to just ignore the warnings, as most other people will do as well.
Twitter said the initiative was to “help promote informed discussion”.
It’s not without reason – the blind share is a prevalent and well-documented practice on social media, and it’s apparently giving us all a bit of false confidence in our opinions. p
“Because most social media users only have a passing engagement with posted news, exposure to political information on social media may simply create the illusion of political learning,” York College of Pennsylvania researchers wrote last year.
Satirical website The
Science Post perhaps summed up the issue best, posting a widely shared story headlined “Study: 70 per cent of Facebook users only read the headline of science stories before commenting”.
The story was largely made up of the famous placeholder text Lorem ipsum. p