Screenshots versus links

I’m seeing it more and more on social media, particularly on Facebook — someone will share an article, but rather than sharing a link to it they’ll just share a screenshot of the title and the first few sentences of the article.

The problems

This causes a few problems, with the main one being a lack of information. When people only have the title to base their opinion on, then that’s what you get. Some may search to find the full article and read it, but most will just respond to the headline. Rather than reading the article to get more context, people react to the title alone (which often is slanted with some clickbait) and may miss the point.

Of course, even with a link in place people will often react without reading.

Why?

This practice of sharing screenshots rather than links seems odd to me, so I’ve been trying to figure out what’s causing it. I see three potential reasons.

1. Ease of sharing. People are used to sharing photos on Facebook, so they just do that here. I’m not convinced this is the reason, as the initial sharing would be easier as a link than as a screenshot -> crop -> share.
2. Facebook algorithms prefer it. There’s no doubt that this is a piece of it, as Facebook’s algorithm much prefers photos than it does external links.