MALAYSIANS are the No. 1 users of WhatsApp to consume news globally followed by Brazil and Chile, according to the Digital News Report 2017.
More than half of the sample in Malaysia (51%) told the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University that they have used the app for sharing or discussing news in a given week compared with just 3% in the United States.
The report indicated that 39% of news consumers in Malaysia sometimes or often avoid the news and the reason cited is to avoid the “negativity”.
It also revealed that only 29% of Malaysian news consumers trust the media and as for the rest of the world, the media trust varies with Finland being the highest at 62% and South Korea the lowest at 23%.
According to the report, 67% of news gained by Malaysians were from social media, 54% from television, 45% from print and 15% of news were sourced from the radio.
The most commonly used device for news consumption in the country are smartphones (65%), computer (45%) and tablet (18%).
Meanwhile, the top social media and messaging application used for news consumption by Malaysians are Facebook (58%), WhatsApp (51%), YouTube (26%), WeChat (13%) and Instagram (13%).
The research was conducted online between January and early February this year surveying 70,000 news consumers in 36 countries. The United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Hong Kong, Singapore and France were among the 36 countries surveyed. – September 11, 2017.
Source : Malaysian Insight
