A latest reports state that online news on social media has outpaced the print media as the main source of news among the Indian youth. According to Reuters people over the age of 35 tend to mix the print and online text to a great extent. 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.
75 percent of respondents using Facebook, and 82 percent using WhatsApp. Other social media widely used for news include Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook’s Messenger – whereas Snapchat is much less widely used. The research showed that people in India have low trust in news overall (36 percent). But they have higher levels of trust in the news in search (45 percent) and social media (34 percent) than respondents in many other countries.
Nearly 60 percent 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.
