Summary A recent study indicates that WhatsApp is rapidly growing as a medium to discuss and share news.
(Web Desk) - When WhatsApp was first introduced to the world in 2009, it was regarded as a go-to application for the sole purpose of online messaging. As years passed by, WhatsApp soon became one of the most common applications on a smartphone and with time the evolvement of WhatsApp became prominent. From its initial use for the sole purpose of messaging, WhatsApp expanded to other features such as the WhatsApp call and video call. But now, in 2017, WhatsApp is being used a source to discover and discuss news online.
According to a research carried out by the Reuters Institute for the study of Journalism, WhatsApp is rapidly growing as a medium to discuss news. The research covered 34 various countries in Europe, the Americas and Asia, in addition to Taiwan and Hong Kong. For the purpose of research, a total of 71,805 people were questioned by YouGov in January and February to generate its data.
Graph: BBC
The results eventually showed something quite intriguing. Although, according to the results, Facebook was still the most popular social media network for communicating and discussing and sharing news in all the countries except Japan and South Korea, the use of WhatsApp had increased by a fair bit. Although WhatsApp’s general use exceed its use for sharing of news media, it was considered as the 3rd most widely used media for the purpose of news engagement.
Graph: BBC
The results further showed that WhatsApp was particularly in high demand in countries such as Malaysia, Brazil and Singapore. The authors provided several potential explanations for WhatsApp s rise. Its use of end-to-end encryption means messages can only be seen by their senders and recipients, offering users protection against being monitored by the authorities. WhatsApp has also benefited from the fact that in much of Latin America and elsewhere mobile networks are offering unlimited data use within the program, so encouraging its use.
In much larger parts of the world like the United Kingdom and the United States, BBC and Yahoo News still leads the way in terms of daily usage since much of the population have a hard time ‘trusting the source’ of the news shared on social media especially WhatsApp.
