Forwarding links without browsing links in online social networks

Online social networks(OSNs) become important platforms of information diffusion. People forward links pointing to interesting content, and share them with friends. Browsing links is generally considered as the previous step for forwarding links. However, few studies have confirmed this hypothesis before. The deep understanding of forwarding links can help OSNs to improve current forwarding mechanism, and allow people to read more information and forward more links. In this paper, we study the relationship between forwarding links and browsing links. We crawled a connected graph component of 42.1 million users, and 2.1 billion links forwarded by them. Moreover, we collected browsing records of 50,000 active users. Based on these datasets, we observe that 42% of users forward more than 50% of links without browsing links. Browsing links is often unnecessary for forwarding links. This finding changes the traditional concept of link dissemination in OSNs. We also find that when users directly forward links, they have more time to leave more comments and forward more links, which promotes the spreading of links. OSNs should encourage people to read snippets and directly forward links.