Mood of First-Time Voter: 47% of East relies on social media for news; over third of North, West admits fake news sways its opinion

The Lok Sabha election in a few months is set to see a massive 130 million first-time voters go to the polls. The stakes are already high for the National Democratic Alliance that seeks to secure five more years and a seemingly united Opposition that seeks to dislodge the ruling BJP and its allies at any cost.

To get a better idea of how young first-time voters — people aged 18 to 21 — perceive of the forthcoming election, YouGov India and Firstpost conducted a nationwide survey between 3 and 9 January. There was a total of 1,324 respondents, from a panel of over 40,000, who answered questions ranging from politics and jobs, to religion and the media. The findings are being serialised in four sections:

1)  Politics and Ideology 2) News and Media 3) Religion and Community 4) Jobs and Economy

The second part of the section titled ‘News and Media’ examines the differing views of respondents from across the country’s four zones.

The survey revealed that nearly half (47 percent) the respondents from the East zone cited social media as their primary source of news. This figure dropped to 36, 35 and 32 percent for the West, North and South zones respectively. At the same time, five percent of respondents from the East cited the radio as their primary source of news.

When it comes to trust in a medium, social media and word of mouth were the least trusted of all sources of information, with nearly a fifth of North Indian respondents saying they distrusted social media and 28 percent of South Indian respondents revealing that word of mouth was their least trusted source of information.

And while over two-thirds of all respondents agreed that fake news was a problem today, 35 percent of respondents from the North and a third of respondents from the West said that even if a story about a political leader or party was debunked as fake, they would still be wary of them.