Huge asteroid to wipe out earth population next week or why sharing Facebook randomness is bad

I was browsing through my Facebook feed recently and saw a very interesting article, actually alarming, claiming an asteroid was set to hit earth some time next week. I don't usually click on Facebook links as most are bogus, but this one turned out to be pretty interesting.

The first half of the article seemed legit talking about this asteroid on path to collide with earth... and then the author of the article revealed that it was a joke... which you probably figured out by now. And,then went on to talk about a new study (link below to that story) that shows how Facebook and Twitter users are more likely to tweet and share salacious gossip news stories without actually reading them first.

So if someone is spreading rumors, they only need to entitle their story with some salacious comment for it to be picked up and shared heavily. This is the link to the original story, not the original article that I clicked on from Facebook - sharing this link for more information about the study.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/new...epressing-study/

the study finds that these sort of blind peer-to-peer shares are really important in determining what news gets circulated and what just fades off the public radar. So your thoughtless retweets, and those of your friends, are actually shaping our shared political and cultural agendas.

“People are more willing to share an article than read it,” study co-author Arnaud Legout said in a statement. “This is typical of modern information consumption. People form an opinion based on a summary, or a summary of summaries, without making the effort to go deeper.”?

The interesting thing was how this article linked to on Facebook had comments from people commenting on the 'impending doom' rather than the 'study' which showed these people on Facebook had just read the story and not clicked through to read what was going on. Once again proving the point that people are only skimming and making snap judgement about what they read/see on social media.

Not suggesting you role model this idea for social media sharing, but apparently it's something a lot of companies and big pages already know and use to get engagement and comments/shares/retweets from fans and followers.

Any thoughts on this study or phenomenon would be appreciated.