1. Social Media Usage: Trends and Patterns
E
ver since the substantially mediatized national elections of 2014 which for the first time saw the deployment of social media by political parties as a tool for campaigning and reaching out to voters, Lokniti has begun consistently asking questions in its national and state surveys related to the usage of various social media platforms by voters. This data collected over the last five years has allowed us to not just understand the relationship between social media usage and voting choices (thus going beyond our earlier focus on traditional media such as TV news viewership and newspaper readership) but it has also enabled us to track the growth of social media in the country, particularly the intensity or regularity with which it is being used by the people. In this section, we share some of these findings related to social media usage in India and highlight some of the trends and patterns that have been noticed.
Growth and stagnation The use of social media among voters in India has grown by leaps and bounds with several social media platforms witnessing tremendous growth between the 2014 and the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Back in 2014, merely one of every ten voters (9%) was found by Lokniti’s election-time survey to be using Facebook. This figure of usage has increased steadily since, doubling to 20 percent by 2017, and then increasing further to 32 percent during the recent 2019 Lok Sabha elections (Table 1.1). The usage of WhatsApp (bought over by Facebook in 2014) in the country has also followed the same trend. The messaging app that also allows for free audio-video calling was used by only 22 percent of the voters in 2017 and has now increased to 34 percent. The only other social media platform that currently matches the popularity of Facebook and WhatsApp in India is YouTube. Nearly one-third (31%) of the respondents in Lokniti’s survey were found to be using the video sharing site/application. Instagram, which is a relatively new platform, is also quite popular. Acquired by Facebook in 2012, the photo and video sharing social networking service is at present being used by 15 percent or about one-seventh of the country’s electorate.
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