Executive Summary
T
his collaborative report between the Lokniti programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung analyzes the growth of online social networking sites and apps in India and their role in shaping political preferences and attitudes in the recently concluded 2019 Lok Sabha elections. The report is divided into four sections and relies heavily on Lokniti’s survey data. Through an analysis of data related to social media usage, Section 1 of the report shares some of the key trends and patterns noticed in the usage of social media platforms in the country during the last five years. The focus of this section is on five social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram and YouTube – questions about whose usage have been asked in Lokniti’s national surveys since the 2014 elections thus allowing for a longitudinal analysis of the usage of these platforms. The analysis presented in this section shows that Facebook and WhatsApp have seen tremendous growth in the last five years and are currently being used by one-third of the electorate making them the two most popular networking sites in the country at the moment. Twitter on the other hand continues to be the least popular of all social networking sites with a usage of 12 percent. While this is a six-fold increase since 2014 when Lokniti had found it to be used by just 2 percent of all voters, the growth of the platform seems to have stagnated since 2018 when 14 percent of all voters had reported using it in a Lokniti survey. In fact, stagnation is not limited to just Twitter alone. Facebook, WhatsApp and even Instagram too have not seen much growth over the last one year as per the Lokniti data. Nonetheless, it is also noticed that most users who have created an account on these social media platforms seem to be using them regularly (that is, either daily or weekly), except for Twitter which Lokniti’s data suggests has seen a decline in regular usage by its users. In overall terms, after taking the usage of all platforms into consideration, it is found that currently only a little over one-third of the electorate in the country is exposed to social media with the rest two-thirds not using any of the social media platforms about which questions were asked. Moreover, high exposure to social media is found to be only among one-tenth of the country’s electorate. A region wise analysis of the exposure index reveals that the eastern part of the country is way behind the rest of the country in terms of usage/access to social media whereas the southern and northern regions perform the best in this regard. A large part of the social media usage is found to be driven by smartphones, whose ownership has gone up from one-fourth to one-third in the last two years according
Social Media & Political Behaviour | 5
