Read the Article, Not Just the Headline

By Jim Mathews
President & CEO, Rail Passengers Association

If you’ve ever posted a transportation news story on Facebook and found yourself wading through a comments section full of outrage, confusion, or wild misconceptions, you’re not imagining things: most people aren’t reading the article—they’re just reacting to the headline.

Watching the reaction to the Union Pacific-Norfolk Southern merger proposal got me thinking about this, but so, too, does watching the continued posting, and posting, and posting, of the “high-speed transcontinental auto-train” idea. As does watching the TV news stations across the country picking it up without really bothering to understand it.

Look, we’ve all done it. You’re scrolling quickly. A headline catches your eye. You’ve got a hot take. But here’s the thing—when it comes to infrastructure policy, funding mechanisms, or Amtrak service debates, the headline almost never tells the whole story. And scrolling really, provably, fails to engage higher-level thinking.

Yes, I have data to back this up. A 2016 study by Columbia University and Microsoft found that 59% of links shared on Twitter were never clicked. More than half! That means a majority of people commenting or reposting were doing so without ever reading the actual article. Similarly, analytics firm Chartbeat discovered that social media sharing has virtually no correlation with actual time spent reading. It’s all surface-level.

It’s even worse now in 2025, because not only are people skipping the actual article—often it’s not even people doing the sharing! Bot networks and automated scripts are responsible for millions of social shares daily, helping to amplify content without any genuine engagement or critical thought.

More recent work has shown that what’s happening with social-media is a phenomenon psychologists describe as “offloading cognitive effort.” It’s a fancy way of saying that when people are overloaded by information on social media, most people bypass the mental effort required to absorb or even remember what’s said. And if they do engage, they have to be fooled into doing so with a headline or a verb typed in all caps (“Joe DEMOLISHES Their Argument!”)

In fact, I tested this myself a few years ago with a blog post titled “Classic Canadian Excursion Action With Steam.” It had a charming old photo, an irresistible railfan headline… and absolutely nothing to do with steam engines. That’s right—it was a post purposely designed to get our supporters to read about the new rules designed to make our beleaguered trains finally start running on time. (And it was those rules that wound up getting the Surface Transportation Board engaged in investigating Union Pacific for preference violations, as well as the Justice Dept. looking into Norfolk Southern's apparent preference violations on the Crescent.)

Guess what? Engagement with that post was about 10 times higher than our normal policy-oriented posts. And even then, I saw a few comments on a share of the post like this: “Wow, I love this!” “Great photo!” “Where is this excursion happening?” The whole point was to prove exactly this phenomenon: people were reacting to something they hadn’t even read.

Now, when we’re talking about passenger-rail advocacy, this matters. A lot.

Why? Because so much of what we fight for is complex, nuanced, and deeply dependent on the details—details that don’t make it into a pithy headline. Whether it’s the intricacies of the IIJA funding allocations, the real reasons Amtrak needs dispatching preference, or the implications of a 2026 budget bill rerouting Federal-State Partnership funds, the truth is usually in paragraph four. Or footnote two.

If our fellow advocates, passengers, and even policymakers engage with only the headline, we risk losing the argument before we’ve even had a chance to make our case.

So, what can we do?

As we write, (and I know many of you write posts as well as read them), strive for clarity without dumbing it down. Good headlines matter—but so does encouraging clickthrough and comprehension.

For readers, please, please, please: Pause. Click. Skim if you must. But get the gist before weighing in.

For all of us: Share stories, not just summaries. Explain the why, not just the what.

Passenger rail deserves better than a scroll-by. So, the next time you see a spicy headline about Amtrak or transportation policy, resist the urge to fire off a comment. Click the link. Read the piece. Maybe even (gasp!) finish the article.

Because informed engagement is the fuel that keeps advocacy on track.