iWorld
Cyberbullying may lead to depression in Asian kids
MUMBAI: Telenor Group, on this Safer Internet Day 2017, released results from a survey of parents and adults across Asia in order to give greater visibility of the types of digital bullying affecting youth and how they deal with it. The survey was conducted over Facebook with 320 respondents primarily from Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Singapore, Thailand and other Asian countries. While cyberbullying exists across all countries, the respondents said that they are discussing cyberbullying with youth and feel that resilience is being built, which may help them tackle digital abuse or better empathize with victims. The survey targeted Facebook users from 18-64 with stated interests in parenting, family issues, child welfare and online security.
“In the lead up to Safer Internet Day, we conducted this digital survey to keep on the pulse of the ever-evolving arena of digital bullying, to see how it affects children in Asia, and what both adults and children can do about it,” says Telenor Group director – Social Responsibility Zainab Hussain Siddiqui. “Encouragingly, across Asia,we see examples of awareness-building efforts – on the part of our company and many others – reaching scores of children, parents and school teachers. And we hope this is leading to more resilience against online mistreatment.”
Telenor India’s WebWise, a flagship programme on children’s cyber safety & security, also reveals that in India 99 per cent school-going children in urban areas are using internet out of which every second child feels unsafe online. Over 35 per cent children have experienced hacking of their account while 15.74 per cent shared that they have received inappropriate messages.
First things first: Parents say they do talk to their children about cyberbullying Dialogue is the first step in helping children understand how, why and on what channels online mistreatment can happen – and how to manage and report it. One of the first findings of this survey sheds a positive light on the situation. A majority of the respondents (46 per cent) say that they speak to their children ‘all the time’ about internet and online behavior, followed by 39 per cent who discussed this ‘sometimes’. Only 12 per cent said they had never spoken about this topic. A large segment of Asian adults feel empowered and aware enough to address online safety with youth.
Common experiences in cyberbullying
‘Being the target of hostile and rude comments and profanity online’ was the most common form of cyberbullying incidents that respondents’ children had experienced (22.5 per cent of respondents). The next largest group said they ‘did not know’ if any of the listed cyberbullying incidents had occurred to their child. The third largest group said their children had not experienced cyberbullying as they have been ‘trained how to respond and defend themselves’ against this type of activity.
Effects of cyberbullying vary
When asked how cyberbullying experiences affected the child, the answer was multi-layered with some surprises. They implied that Asia’s children are increasingly learning how to deal with bullying online, or actively were able to ignore the attacks with no effect on them. While 29 per cent of respondents said that being cyberbullied affected the child negatively and they were ‘depressed’ for a time period, 24 per cent said that the situation made the child more alert and able to defend themselves online. A further 24 per cent said the child did not seem to be affected, with seven per cent even saying the online bullying ‘inspired the child to then help other victims.’
Cyberbullying and online gaming
Those whose children play online games reported a higher rate of cyberbullying attacks than standard browsing activities. Of those surveyed, 79 per cent said their child or a child that they know has been threatened with physical harm while playing online games specifically on websites or on social media. This was followed by 41 per cent who said the child was the target of offensive comments including name calling, racist or sexist remarks.
Important: Education on appropriate websites
The reportedly most important online safety topic for children was to make sure that they know which websites or social networks are safe – or which should be kept out of bounds (27 per cent of respondents). This was followed closely by education about sharing personal information online (26 per cent), and knowing that people post anonymously online without repercussions (25 per cent).
Other risks: Sharing personal information and visiting forbidden websites
Cyberbullying formed part of the online concerns that adults hold for youth, but the responses of the survey point out that risky online actions in general need to be addressed through education. Of the respondents, 55 per cent said their child had given personal information to strangers online, followed by 51 per cent who said the child had visited websites they were not supposed to.
However, while online scams and social media platforms in an increasingly digital worldappear to be more prolific than ever, it was interesting to note that respondents said their child, or a child they knew, was least likely to experience email and social media account hacking, as well as sharing NSFW (Not Safe for Work) photos or videos.
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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.
