iWorld
Twitter launches multilingual initiatives ahead of assembly polls 2021
KOLKATA: With the #AssemblyElections2021 taking place in Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, and Puducherry, Twitter has unveiled a series of initiatives focused on encouraging informed and healthy conversations between candidates, political parties, citizens, media, and society.
The initiatives include an information search prompt with the Election Commission of India (@ECISVEEP) and state election commissions to provide reliable information around the elections; a custom emoji to encourage participation; a series of pre-bunks and de-bunks to tackle election-related misinformation; and a youth discussion series titled #DemocracyAdda aimed at voter literacy and civic participation among young Indians for the #AssemblyElections2021. These will be activated across six languages including English, Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Assamese and Malayalam, in order to cater to audiences across India. Additionally, to put a spotlight on women in Indian politics, the service will be bringing back #HerPoliticalJourney, a video series where women political leaders talk about their personal stories with leading women news journalists.
Twitter India public policy & government manager Payal Kamat said, "Public conversation is critical during elections, and Twitter is where this unfolds. With digital penetration accelerating in India, more people now have access to credible, authoritative and timely information – crucial tools for exercising their civic rights. By leveraging the power of the Open Internet, we are encouraging people across India to be a part of the #AssemblyElections2021 conversation. None of this would be possible without support from the Election Commission of India, the State Election Commissions, and hope our efforts contribute to healthy and vibrant civic dialogue.”
Election information prompt
Twitter’s new information search prompt will make it easy to find credible and authoritative information about candidate lists, voting dates, polling booths, and EVM voter registration, among other election-related topics.
The ‘Election information prompt’ will be active in six languages including Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam, Assamese, Hindi, and English, supporting more than 20 hashtags. Some of the hashtags include: #विधानसभाचुनाव2021, #বাংলার ভোট 2021, #കേരളാതെരഞ്ഞെടുപ്പ്2021, #অসমনিৰ্বাচন২০২১, #தமிழ்நாடுதேர்தல்2021, #புதுச்சேரிவாக்கெடுப்பு2021
Custom emoji
Twitter has launched a custom emoji for the #AssemblyElections2021 to stimulate participation in election-related discussions. Featuring an inked finger to represent a citizen who has exercised their right to vote, the emoji is available now until 10 May 2021. People can Tweet in English, Hindi, Bengali, Malayalam, Assamese and Tamil to activate the emoji.
Pre-Bunks and De-Bunks
Staying ahead of potentially misleading information about how and where to vote, Twitter is publishing a series of pre-bunk prompts across languages including English, Hindi, Tamil and Bengali based on content by the national and state election commissions and civil society partners such as Youth Ki Awaz, Association of Democratic Reforms. The prompts will appear on people’s home timelines and in Search, including information about how to register to vote, and details on EVMs and VVPATs. The prompts will also serve the public with relevant voting information about booths, postal ballots, Covid2019 restrictions and accessibility, among other topics. Additionally, the service will focus on de-bunking critical issues as they arise with a curated Twitter Moment. These Moments are created based on high standards of accuracy, impartiality and fairness and are designed to feature compelling, original, and diverse content.
#DemocracyAdda
With the youth of the nation engaging in high quality discussions on the service, Twitter, in partnership with Youth Ki Awaaz (@YouthKiAwaaz), is bringing back its multilingual youth discussion series #DemocracyAdda, aimed at voter literacy and civic participation among young Indians for #AssemblyElections2021. The series will be available in English, Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam and Bengali. Twitter will be hosting live video sessions and Tweet chats with young citizens, civil society groups, changemakers and representative candidates to talk about key issues including gender equality, employment, education, health, among others.
#HerPoliticalJourney
While women leaders are making their presence felt in Indian politics, election coverage continues to be largely male-dominated. With this in mind, Twitter is launching the second season of #HerPoliticalJourney, a video series to put the spotlight on women in Indian politics and their personal stories of challenges and triumph. The series aims to raise awareness about the systemic challenges women face when pursuing political careers. The series will feature women leaders such in conversation with leading women news journalists. The videos will be recorded in English, Tamil, Bengali, Malayalam and Assamese.
eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
CALIFORNIA, MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
