Stats for questions that were shared by users

Question

When a question does not have any answers, we see this below the question:

Are there any statistics about who shared and what questions have been shared?

Answer 1

When you share a post by clicking the 'share' button, you get a url that includes your user ID in the URL:

https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/234559/209637

The numbers after the last slash correspond to the User ID of the person who shared it, in this case, it's my user ID:

https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/209637/jmac

These do get tracked, and a query is regularly run on the SE side to assign badges:

• Announcer (25 referrals)
• Booster (300 referrals)
• Publicist (1000 referrals)

Since these queries look at unique IP addresses, the query has to look at PII, which is not shared publicly according to our privacy policy.

So yes, it is possible to track, and is tracked, but is not made public for that reason.

Since all the links to various social networks use that same URL, there is no way to be certain where the question actually came from originally. If I tweet something that someone shares on their Facebook, even if we do detect that a user came from a Facebook link, we have no way of knowing which social network the link was originally shared to. I'm not sure how much of that data is stored, and how it's stored (if it is), but chances are that stats beyond the badges isn't readily available if at all.