Social media have enabled laypersons to disseminate, at scale, links to news and public affairs information. Many individuals share such links without first reading the linked information. Here we analysed over 35 million public Facebook posts with uniform resource locators shared between 2017 and 2020, and discovered that such ‘shares without clicks’ (SwoCs) constitute around 75% of forwarded links. Extreme and user-aligned political content received more SwoCs, with partisans engaging in it more than politically neutral users. In addition, analyses with 2,969 false uniform resource locators revealed higher shares and, hence, SwoCs by conservatives (76.94%) than liberals (14.25%), probably because, in our dataset, the vast majority (76–82%) of them originated from conservative news domains. Findings suggest that the virality of political content on social media (including misinformation) is driven by superficial processing of headlines and blurbs rather than systematic processing of core content, which has design implications for promoting deliberate discourse in the online public sphere.

社交媒体使非专业人士能够大规模传播新闻和公共事务信息的链接。许多人在没有先阅读链接信息的情况下分享此类链接。在这里，我们分析了 2017 年至 2020 年间分享的超过 3500 万条带有统一资源定位器的公开 Facebook 帖子，发现此类“无点击分享”（SwoC） 约占转发链接的 75%。极端和与用户保持一致的政治内容收到了更多的 SwoC，游击队员比政治中立的用户更多地参与其中。此外，对 2,969 个错误的统一资源定位器的分析显示，保守派 （76.94%） 的份额更高，因此 SwoC 高于自由派 （14.25%），这可能是因为，在我们的数据集中，其中绝大多数 （76-82%） 来自保守派新闻领域。研究结果表明，社交媒体上政治内容（包括错误信息）的病毒式传播是由对标题和简介的肤浅处理驱动的，而不是对核心内容的系统处理，这对在在线公共领域促进蓄意讨论具有设计意义。