How Indians are using Social media for news consumption: A study

Abstract

The rise of the Social media has been phenomenal in India in the recent decade, giving rise to various ways and patterns of news consumption, across media platforms for readers and audiences. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and blogs have become popular platforms for news sharing among people. Several studies also indicate that mainstream media journalists are increasingly engaging with Social media where news breaks first and intense debates and deliberations on important events takes place consequentially. The popularity of Social media is such in India that people across all age groups are beginning to view it as a source of news. At the moment, Facebook and, to a lesser extent, Twitter, dominate this intersection of social media and news. Facebook has made several moves to shift the content of a user‘s News Feed towards hard news — towards providing the RSS-like news experience people never knew they wanted. Facebook started with juicing the popularity of breaking stories by its favorite publishers inside the News Feed and Paper, its news app, but today, the company is taking its news efforts one step further. Facebook is announcing Newswire, an official Facebook page you can follow that aggregates the best original content posted on the site. If you‘d like, you can even follow the channel on Twitter — which is precisely the service Newswire seems designed to compete with. With technology evolving at such a rapid rate, with a strong impact on Journalism and consumption of news, It is important to examine the role of social media news consumption among the users of social media. Although social networking sites have primarily been seen as social tools connecting friends and family, news organizations have discovered the value of these sites to make stories go "viral" and get more traffic to their own sites. So users who may have signed up for Facebook primarily to connect with others could inadvertently see news content posted by friends in their network or subscribing to news feeds. The potential result? On one end -- unintended exposure to news and diversity of viewpoints -- and at the other end -- exposure to like-minded viewpoints resulting in an ever increasing cycle of selective exposure. How do different social networking websites stack up when it comes to news? How many people engage with news across multiple social sites? And what are their news consumption habits on traditional platforms? This study examines and analyzes the characteristics of news consumers and the size of their population across social networking sites. The study is based on a survey conducted among the users of Social Media in South India and aims to analyse how people consume news on Social Media.