I’ve mentioned for years that the trend of sharing screenshots of articles (instead of links to the article) is very problematic, and I recently saw the perfect example.
I saw an article being shared around on Facebook that only had this screenshot for reference:
In one case, I saw over 10,000 comments on the article, with the overwhelming majority coming from people who were absolutely sure that it was caused by the COVID vaccine. Here is a quick slice of some of them:
Without even getting into the science of vaccines, all of these people are 100% wrong — because they didn’t bother to find the article before commenting.
Why?
If you do a simple Google search to see what this study was about, you quickly find this line:
The study, led by the University of Melbourne, analysed government data on all diagnoses of bowel cancer (also known as colorectal cancer) in Australia from 1990-2020.
In other words, the study was over before the first COVID vaccine was released, and therefore it is impossible for the vaccine to have caused a single case of cancer in the study.
Yet the majority of the 10,000 people that commented on this post were completely confident that vaccines caused these cancers, despite having zero medical correlation and despite the very study they were referencing making it quite impossible to be true. This could have been solved if any of those commenters took the time to read what they were responding to.
Why Doesn’t America Read Anymore?
It reminds me of the 2014 April Fool’s prank from NPR where they shared a link on social media that asked “Why Doesn’t America Read Anymore?” that led to this page. Of course, most of the comments on social media were strong opinions about reading without having clicked to actually do the reading.
It’s similar to how Marjorie Taylor Greene recently voted on the “Big Beautiful Bill” without reading it, and now she’s very upset at what she voted for. Reading is important.
While there is no excuse for making such arrogant and condescending comments without doing the most basic bit of research, Facebook is partly to blame as well. Facebook, along with most other social platforms, greatly discourages users from adding links to posts. Some data shows that adding a link to your post can cut engagement by up to 90%!
If the person that shared this story had shared a proper link instead of an image, it wouldn’t have traveled anywhere near as far.
At the end of the day, links or no links (and with fake AI stuff becoming more common), I encourage you to always take a moment to find and read what you’re about to leave a comment on.
