Social media main news source for young Indians

Online news generally and social media specifically have outpaced print as the main source of news among English-speaking young Indian news users, showed a new report.

People over 35 still mix online and offline media to a great extent, according to the Oxford University's Reuters Institute India Digital News Report.

While more than half of respondents in the study reported getting news from social media, a quarter identified social media as their main source of online news.

Facebook and WhatsApp are particularly widely used, with 75 per cent of respondents using Facebook (and 52 per centsaying they get news there), and 82 per cent using WhatsApp (with 52 per cent getting news there).

Other social media widely used for news include Instagram, Twitter and Facebook's Messenger - whereas Snapchat is much less widely used.

Based on data from a survey of English-speaking online news users in India, the study also showed that India has emerging as an overwhelmingly mobile-first, and for many mobile-only, media market.

Nearly 70 per cent of the respondents identified smartphones as their main device for online news.

The research showed that people in India have low trust in news overall (36 per cent). But they have higher levels of trust in news in search (45 per cent) and social media (34 per cent) than respondents in many other countries.

Nearly 60 per cent of users are worried whether online news they come across is real or fake.

More than half of the respondents said they fear openly expressing their political views online could get them into trouble with authorities, the study showed.

--IANS

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