People are quicker to share than read news on Twitter, according to a new study which found that 59 per cent of all links shared on the website went unclicked, and presumably unread, even by people who shared them. The tiny fraction of headlines that news editors push out on Twitter draw a large share of eyeballs, but it is the stories recommended by friends that trigger more clicks, the study found. In what may be the first independent study of news consumption on social media, researchers at Columbia University and the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (INRIA) found that reader referrals drove 61 per cent of the nearly 10 million clicks in a random sample of news stories posted on Twitter.
