KATHMANDU, NOV 21 -Facebook and Twitter witnessed significant growth in interaction by Nepali users after the vote count of the second Constituent Assembly (CA) election started on Wednesday. That is not all; many Nepali news portals faced traffic congestion due to the rise of visitors for polls updates.
Though social media is not new to Nepali users, this is the first time such a huge number of tweets and Facebook wall posts are flooded with CA election’s result updates. “The number of tweets by Nepali users has swelled significantly on Wednesday because of the election updates,” said Aakar Anil, a social media enthusiast.
According to Anil, on average 3.5 tweets are twitted per minute mentioning #NepalVotes and tweets without hash tag and Nepali language have also increased. There are estimated 2.2 million Facebook users and 20,000 plus twitter users from Nepal. The rise in use of both social and online media in the country is attributed to the increased access of the data services.
“Online social media is instant and carries informative value,” said Binod Bhattarai, a media expert talking about the twitter and election updates. He added that this was probably the first time Nepalis have used the social and online media in such a way and that it has also indicated that traditional media like TV stations and newspapers need to reinvent themselves.
Owing to the advent of telecom services and competition in market, the internet service has become available in cell phones, increasing the number of social media users to grow. The government records show that more than 6 million people in the country use internet through their cell phones.
“Online and social media have become the best option for users having internet access to be updated with latest development without even turning on the TV and the radio,” said Ananda Raj Khanal, acting chief of the Nepal Telecommunications Authority (NTA). He said data access has become cheaper, making it affordable to people.
The NTA statistics shows that the country’s data penetration rate touched 26.93 percent by mid-August in 2013. On Wednesday, many news portals providing the latest election results had faced traffic congestion for which they were down time to time. The sites had provided live updates of poll results and were also used as a source by social media users. Among others, the top ranking sites like ekantipur.com, onlinekhabar.com and nagariknews.com were down time to time as many people were trying to visit the sites to get election results.
Pawan Shakya, former president of the Internet Service Providers Association of Nepal, said the Nepali news portals witnessed problems of their sites going down for the rise in bandwidth consumption. “Mainly locally hosted sites have these types of problems,” he said.
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