NEWS
Apparently A Lot Of Malaysians Love Using WhatsApp To Consume News
Malaysians must really love using WhatsApp. Whether it is being bombarded by a gazillion messages in the gazillion group chats we’re forced to be in or sending meaningless gifs to your BFF every other hour, the messaging app is likely one of the first items we open upon swiping your mobile phone.
And apparently, Malaysians also love consuming news with WhatsApp - more than other countries around the world, in fact!According to the Digital News Report 2017 by Oxford University’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 51 per cent of Malaysian news consumers used WhatsApp to find, share or discuss news in a given week.
In fact, WhatsApp is starting to rival Facebook (58 per cent) here in terms of news consumption because messaging apps like this tend to be more private and doesn’t filter content algorithmically.
Similar results are found in Brazil and Chile, with 46 per cent and 39 per cent respectively.This could be due to Malaysia’s growing internet penetration rate that is contributing to people using online news portals as a medium for news, University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus’ Centre for the Study of Communications and Culture professor Zaharom Nain said, as quoted by The Star.
The digital report also revealed the other social media and messaging apps that are driving Malaysians’ online news consumption patterns include YouTube (26 per cent), WeChat (13 per cent) and Instagram (13 per cent).
Besides that, the findings showed that the majority of consumers tend to source online news most with social media platforms winning by a landslide at 86 per cent, followed by print (45 per cent), TV (54 per cent) and radio (15 per cent).Without a doubt, the most popular device used for news consumption was smartphones (65 per cent), followed by computers (45 per cent) and tablets (18 per cent).
What do you think about reading and sharing news using messaging apps like WhatsApp? Do share your thoughts with us!
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