However, it’s also possible that they saw it described as a 20 minute read

Bit of a tangent and anecdotal, but I went back in to higher education a few years ago. I’m middle-aged, I was surrounded by younger people. We’re asked to read an article, everyone starts reading. I read it through, underline the important bits, I’m done reading. I look around. Everyone’s still reading. Oh well, they’ll be done soon. Nope. I think it took most of them 15 minutes to read an article I’d read in under 5. I was a bit perplexed. This is higher education, these aren’t idiots, these are people who should be able to read articles quickly.

There are plenty of reports of functional literacy decreasing. That children are slower at reading and are less able to understand what they’ve read. Anecdotally, it seems like younger generations really aren’t used to reading longer articles anymore. I grew up reading books as a kid. That’s what we did before phones and the internet. I wonder if younger generations simply don’t have that much experience reading, which is why it takes them so long to read, which is why they read even less.

In the case of this article, they see 20 minutes, they’re scared off. So they simply guess what was in the article. That’s pretty worrying if that’s what people do. If you’re unable or unwilling to read longer stuff, you’re likely to make ill informed choices or be more easily influenced.