The authenticity of social media information among youth: Indian perspective

Abstract

We are living in a world where media landscape is changing rapidly. India is a young country with lots of opportunities and possibilities to flourish and enjoy the world wide information. The youth, particularly, in India is growing up within a world of inescapable technology as the first generation learners. The medium of exchanging the information has changed; now the information exchange takes place through Facebook, Twitter, Emails, YouTube, WhatsApp and so on, to communicate and disseminate information and knowledge with others. A very alarming fact is that the youths are barring newspapers, books and magazines and consider social media as the best platform to find latest happenings, trends and new information. However, the liability and the authenticity of social media messages among youth is always under question marked. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether and to what extent social media information is reliable and authentic. More importantly, what kind of content gives the most value to the youth? The paper will also classify the different content spread through social media and its impact over society especially youth. The research will be evaluated on the random sampling covering size 150 (population), targeted audience will be youth from different states of India. The objective of this paper is to attain statistics from youth to check the reliability and validity of the social media content.