A significant proportion of people share online articles without having read them.
NOT BSTOTAL BS
HARDLY BS — Verdict: Mostly True
Verified by Lenz ·
The Short Version
A major peer-reviewed study in Nature Human Behaviour, analyzing 56.4 billion Facebook shares, found that roughly 75% of news links were shared without the user clicking on them — strongly supporting the claim that "a significant proportion" of people share articles without reading them. However, the evidence primarily comes from one platform (Facebook, 2017–2020), and "shares without clicks" is a proxy for non-reading, not direct proof. The claim's broad framing slightly overstates what the data strictly demonstrates.
Caveats
The ~75% figure measures 'shares without clicks' on Facebook — a strong but imperfect proxy for not having read the article, since users could have read content through other means.
Nearly all cited 'corroborating' sources are secondary write-ups of the same single study, not independent replications across different platforms or time periods.
The evidence is drawn from Facebook public posts (2017–2020) and may not generalize to other social media platforms or current sharing behavior.