Singaporeans and Malaysians are biggest users of social media as primary news source – study
Malaysians and Singaporeans use social media as their primary source of news more than any other market in a nine country study by YouGov for the Reuters Institute.
Nowhere more than in Malaysia and Korea is the internet the most important source of news, although these countries are also where news is the least trusted, the report found.
Social sites such as Facebook – which has recently been subject to scrutiny for carrying fake news in the wake of the election of Donald Trump as US president – are preferred to television as news sources in Singapore and Malaysia, in contrast to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, the US and the UK, where TV is still relatively strong.
Nowhere more than Singapore are newspapers still regarded as the dominant news source, affirming the market clout of the country’s largest ad medium, the Straits Times. However Singapore shows the biggest gap between young and old in who is consuming print media, a statistic reflected in the ST’s steadily dwindling print readership.
In Singapore and Malaysia, one quarter of respondents named social media as their main source of news – far higher than in Hong Kong or Taiwan. In Japan and Korea, search and aggregators, including portals such as Yahoo Japan and Naver, are preferred to social media as ways to find news.
Even among older age groups, television is not seen as a key news source in Singapore and Malaysia as it is among more senior news consumers particularly in the US. In Singapore, only 13% of millennials see TV as their main source of news.
It will not come as a surprise that Asian countries, with the exceptions of Japan and Taiwan, are the mostly likely to consumer their news through their smartphones.
Hong Kong and Taiwan are the leading markets in which people access news via SMS or apps, while Australians are the least likely to use these gateways.
Malaysia, a country that has been hit by major international headlines such as the 1MDB saga, and the disappearance of the MH370, is where news is the least trusted, with the exception of South Korea, where there is more of a sense of undue political and commercial influence on news.
The study reveals that more people say they trust news organisations than say they trust journalists, and Malaysians have the least faith in their journalists.
Taiwanese, Hongkongers and Malaysians, who typically tend to be very vocal online, are the most likely to get involved in a news story, either by writing a blog, joining a campaign, or commenting on a news story.
The newspapers in Singapore and Malaysia print what they are told or else. Therefore the only reliable news source is online.
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