Is sharing just a function of viewing? The sharing of political and non-political news on Facebook

How is political news shared online? This fundamental question for communication research in today’s ecology still poorly understood. In particular, very little known about whether and how sharing differs from viewing. Based on a unique dataset of ≈ 870,000 URLs 100 million times Facebook, grouped by countries, age brackets, months, we study the correlates viewing versus non-political news. We first identify websites that at least occasionally contain items, then analyze metrics items published these websites. enrich with natural language processing super- vised machine learning. find are viewed less than but more one would expect based their views. Furthermore, source item textual features, which often studied clickbait commercial A/B testing, matter. Our findings conditional age, similar across four different countries (Italy, Germany, Netherlands, Poland). While our design does not allow causal claims, suggest future work well-advised to both theoretically methodologically differentiate between factors may explain (a) news, (b)