Team News

The number of people worldwide who are informed through newspapers or TV has fallen by 10% since 2018. Younger age groups prefer to access news through social media, according to a report published on Tuesday.

Users are more interested in celebrities, influencers and personalities who appear on social networks, on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat, according to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism in its annual report.

TikTok is the fastest-growing social network featured in the report, used for information by 20% of users aged 18 to 24, up 5% from last year. Less than half of respondents expressed a great interest in news in general.

“There is no reason to hope that those born in the 2000s will suddenly start preferring old websites, let alone print and television news,” said the Institute’s director in the report, Rasmus Nielsen. The report was based on an online survey of nearly 94,000 adults in 46 countries, including the United States of America.

Less than 1/3 of respondents said that a good way to stay informed is through news selected by algorithms rather than editors or journalists. Trust in the news has fallen 2% over the past year, reversing gains seen in many countries at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

On average, 40% of respondents said they trust most of the news they read. The United States has seen a 6% increase in its trust in the news, reaching 32%, but remains among the lowest in the ranking.

While 56% of citizens in media markets say they cannot tell the difference between real and fake news online, this figure has increased by 2% from last year.

The survey found that 48% of respondents said they are very interested in news, up from 63% in 2017.

Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has alleged that the Indian government threatened to shut the platform and raid employees’ houses in the country.

In an interview with a US-based YouTube channel, Mr Dorsey said India requested removal of several tweets and accounts linked to the farmers’ protest in 2020.

Twitter was also asked to censor journalists critical of the government, he alleged.

India has denied the allegations and accused Twitter of violating laws.

“This is an outright lie… Perhaps an attempt to brush out that very dubious period of Twitter’s history,” federal minister Rajeev Chandrashekar tweeted on Tuesday.

“No one went to jail nor was Twitter ‘shutdown’. Dorsey’s Twitter regime had a problem accepting the sovereignty of Indian law. It behaved as if the laws of India did not apply to it.”

Mr Dorsey’s comments – made to the American news series Breaking Points – are the latest in an already troubled relationship between Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government and Twitter.

It also comes at a time when the platform has been caught up in an intensifying debate on its role in supporting principles of free speech amid demands in several countries to control Twittter’s influence.

• The Indian government’s war with Twitter

Mr Dorsey quit as the Twitter CEO in 2021 and the social media platform was purchased by billionaire Elon Musk in 2022.

In the interview, which was uploaded on YouTube on Monday, Mr Dorsey said “countries like India and Turkey made many requests to us to take down journalists’ accounts that give tactile information and remove them from the platform”.

He added that he was “surprised at the level of engagement and requests” by governments of the world to censor content on the platform during his time.

“India, for example, was a country that had many requests around the farmers’ protests, around particular journalists that were critical of the government,” he said.

“It manifested in ways such as: ‘we will shut Twitter down in India’ – which is a very large market for us; ‘we will raid the homes of your employees,’ which they did; ‘we will shut down your offices if you don’t follow suit.’ And this is India, a democratic country,” Mr Dorsey told the show’s hosts Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti.

At the height of the farmers’ protests against a series of agriculture reform laws, the government had asked Twitter to remove tweets it believed that had used an incendiary hashtag, and accounts it alleged were used by Pakistan-backed Sikh separatist groups.

The request came after the largely peaceful protest had been jolted by violence on 26 January 2021, which left one person dead and hundreds of policemen injured.

Twitter had first blocked some 250 accounts, including those of a news magazine and activists and organisations associated with supporting the year-long protests on the outskirts of capital Delhi.

But six hours later, Twitter restored the accounts, citing “insufficient justification” for continuing the suspension.

The Indian government immediately ordered Twitter to block the accounts again and told the company’s employees in India that legal action would be taken – which could be up to seven years in prison – if they did not comply.

Twitter responded, saying it would not block accounts belonging to media companies, journalists, activists and politicians because that would “violate their fundamental right to free expression under the Indian law”.

Relations between Twitter and Mr Modi’s government have been downhill ever since.

• Why India is the world leader of internet shutdowns

Critics say that at the heart of this is a new internet law that puts social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook under the direct supervision of the government. The government says the rules are meant to tackle misinformation and hate speech, but experts worry it would lead to censorship.

Mr Musk, who succeeded Mr Dorsey, said in April that “rules in India for what can appear on social media are quite strict”.

In Monday’s interview, Mr Dorsey compared India’s actions to those by governments in Turkey and Nigeria, which have briefly restricted the platform in the past.

“Turkey is very similar [to India], we had so many requests from Turkey. We fought Turkey in their courts and often won, but they threatened to shut us down constantly,” he said.

“Nigeria is another example… The situation was such that we could not even put our employees on the ground in the country out of fear of what the government might do to them.”

NASA has launched a spacecraft as part of a mission in a bid to avert a “potential internet apocalypse” that could leave people without internet access for months.

Scientists have warned of the potential impact of an upcoming solar storm, commonly referred to as the “internet apocalypse”, which could strike within the next decade.

The spacecraft, which launched in 2018, made a remarkable journey that brought it close to the surface of the sun, where the solar wind is generated.

According to the report, the solar wind consists of a continuous stream of charged particles emanating from the sun’s outermost atmosphere, known as the corona.

Despite the harsh conditions of heat and intense radiation, the Parker Solar Probe persevered in gathering vital information about the workings of the sun.

University of California Professor Stuart Bale, who served as lead author of the study, explained the importance of understanding the solar wind.

“The winds carry a lot of information from the sun to Earth. So understanding the mechanism behind the solar wind is important for practical reasons on Earth,” Bale was quoted as saying.

“This will affect our ability to understand how the sun emits energy and drives geomagnetic storms — which are a threat to our communications networks,” he added.

Such an event could cause people to lose internet access for months or even years, rendering satellites and power lines useless.