Six in 10 people will post a news story on social media without reading it

Social media is now more popular than TV as the main source of news for young people.

Despite this, a study has found that six in 10 people who share news links on Twitter and Facebook, do so without ever having read them.

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

The research was done by researchers from Columbia University and the French National Institute, who looked at 2.8 million shares on Twitter.

Their results showed that 59 per cent of links shared on social media have never been clicked.

In a statement, Arnaud Legout, who co-authored the study, said: 'People are more willing to share an article than read it. '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.'

The study also suggests that these unread shares to friends are important in determining which news gets circulated, and which news makes no impact.

The researchers say off-the-cuff sharing of news on social media could be having a greater impact on political and cultural agendas than ever realised.

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 map showed that viral news is widely shared across the social media site, but is not necessarily read.

The researchers also found that most clicks to news stories were made on links shared by regular Twitter users, and not the media outlet itself.

These links were not necessarily new either - often the links that users clicked had been posted for a few days.

This is not the first time that the tendency to share without reading has been demonstrated.

On June 4, The Science Post published an article titled 'Study: 70 pe rcent of Facebook users only read the headline of science stories before commenting.'

Those who read the article would have found that it was just a block of 'lorem ipsum' text, with no meaning.

Despite the fact that the article contained no real content, it was shared by nearly 46,000 people.

While the reasons as to why the majority of people share news without reading it are yet to be explained, it could be in part due to the 'sharebait' trend that we are seeing amongt Internet culture.