Social Media Statistics in India

• Internet penetration is low in India - yet, in December 2018, 566 million users were online in India. Out of this - 493 million are regular users of the internet. (Source: Livemint).
• At the end of 2019, this number has been estimated to grow to 351.4 million. (Source: Statista)
• On average, Indian users spend 2.4 hours on social media a day (slightly below the global average of 2.5 hours a day). (Source: The Hindu)
• 290 million active social media users in India access social networks through their mobile devices.
• 86% of the total numbers of social media users engage in some form of activity on their social channels.
• 97% of Indians who are connected to the internet watch videos online.
• Gender inequality is really high on Twitter with 16% of the audience being female and 84% of the audience being male.
• Facebook is the most popular social network in India.

• But on the darker side, Facebook removed over 300 crore fake accounts between October 2018 and March 2019 and India has the 3^rd largest number of fake followers on Instagram after the US and Brazil. The Over-The-Top (OTT) media service video segment has seen the maximum traction in the last couple of years. With more than 30 OTT video platforms in the country, multiple audio streaming options and emerging gaming ecosystem has led to an increase in video and audio consumption as there are more diversity and quality in the content. Such estimates pose grave challenges for the safer social media engagements in India.
• It is estimated that the digital market in India is set to become the second-largest within media and entertainment behind TV by 2022 which will lead to more content creation and more advertisement opportunities.

Source: Statista reports 2019

Encryption is the new challenge facing law enforcement not just in India but around the world. Social media apps such as WhatsApp and Viber have gone ahead and provided end-to-end encryption (E2EE) communications to users. But the irony is that there are no policies related to encryption in India thus, making us vulnerable towards the rising cyber-attacks.