India
*Survey sample primarily comprised of English speakers
Cheap mobile data, rising smartphone and social media use, combined with the large potential audience help to explain the popularity of news creators, influencers, and big personality journalists in India. Our data, along with the very high follower counts, indicate that the names at the top of this list have significant reach and influence, at least with our more educated, English-speaking, urban Indian sample.
Dhruv Rathee is a young YouTuber, influencer, and activist who operates mainly in Hindi. Based in Germany, Rathee focuses on news, politics, and social justice and is also frequently critical of the Modi government. A 2024 video entitled ‘Is India becoming a Dictatorship?’ garnered 26m views. His videos aim to simplify complex topics and present them in an engaging way. Often coupled with his own opinion, he reaches a large audience of younger Indians.
In the 2025 World Press Freedom Index, India ranked 151st out of 180 countries. A combination of highly concentrated media ownership, political influence on several mainstream news providers, and concerns for safety has seen many seasoned journalists moving their reporting and analysis to platforms like YouTube where they believe they can provide a more critical perspective. A case in point is Ravish Kumar (14m followers), a former editor with NDTV, who has consistently highlighted issues such as media bias, communalism, and suppression of dissent. He uses his platform to highlight what he calls the ‘collapse’ of independent journalism under Modi’s tenure. Abhisar Sharma (9m+ followers), another former mainstream TV anchor, presents his views on political issues on his YouTube channel with the tagline ‘This is the platform where we hold the powerful accountable’.
Akash Banerjee, a political satirist, is best known for The Deshbhakt, a show that regularly lampoons both government and opposition politicians and critiques traditional media practice. In the news-adjacent category, Beer Biceps (real name Ranveer Allahbadia) is a content creator known for his focus on self-improvement, fitness, mental health, lifestyle, and personal development. The Ranveer Show (TRS) is one of India’s most watched podcasts available in both Hindi and English.
News anchors and editors-in-chief from top TV networks have also extended their personal brands to multiple social networks. While mainstream news editors like Arnab Goswami, Rajat Sharma, and Anjana Om Kashyap garner a large amount of mentions, many do not have individual social handles on YouTube but excerpts from popular debate shows appear through the social channels of each news organisation.
The diversity of Indian influencers is hard to represent in a report like this where a significant amount of content is consumed in local languages, with many of the top influencers often switching between Hindi and English. RazaGraphy (5m+ followers), aka Muhammed Raza, is one of number of YouTube channels looking to check facts and expose fake news. Nitish Rajput’s short-form video channels (7m+ followers) are aimed at younger audiences and focus on presenting multiple perspectives to encourage critical thinking. Abhi and Niyu are a husband-and-wife team (6.5m followers) who also create videos that aim to simplify complex issues for millennials.
The influencer ecosystem is both politically influential and fraught. Ahead of India’s recent national elections in 2024, Prime Minister Modi created and attended a National Creators Award where some of the country’s top social media influencers were felicitated by him; a nod to their reach and influence with India’s younger voters. But in an August 2025 directive, India’s apex court urged the government to include penalties for misconduct by social media influencers in its social media guidelines. Content creators like Ranveer Allahbadia are now facing court proceedings for inappropriate comments. Abhisar Sharma, Raju Parulekar, and other journalists are facing criminal defamation complaints by a large Indian business conglomerate. India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has also indicated it will soon outline steps to curb platforms and influencers allegedly disseminating content that may incite violence.
India has the world’s largest YouTube audience with close to 491m users and it is the most important network for independent creators along with Instagram. TikTok is banned in India.
Proportion that regularly pay attention to creators/influencers in social and video networks
38%
(7/24)
Proportion that regularly pay attention to news brands/journalists in social and video networks
34%
(7/24)
Gender balance
14
of the top 16 are men
These lists represent the individuals most mentioned by respondents to our 2025 and 2024 Digital News Report surveys in the context of news and social media and video networks. Respondents who used Facebook, YouTube, X, Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok for news were asked where they paid most attention – including options for traditional news media/journalists, digital-first news outlets not associated with traditional media, creators/personalities who mostly focus on the news, creators/personalities who occasionally focus on the news. For each type, we asked respondents to name up to three examples of who they paid attention to. We then counted the individuals mostly using a tool called OpenRefine to help us use a semi-automated approach to clean the data (e.g. resolve misspellings or alternative names, remove duplicates etc.). In parallel, we also used ChatGPT5 to process and recode the original data, and to identify the most mentioned individuals to give us a way of comparing results. Further details on the tools we used and on small differences in methodology between 2024 and 2025 are provided in our methodology section (link).
Why did you use open fields rather than closed lists to collect the data?
We used open text response boxes, first, because in many countries the most popular news creators and influencers have not yet been identified by previous research. Second, because it would likely not be possible to fully capture the broad and fragmented nature of this ecosystem using a fixed listed of response options. And third, because we wanted to adopt an audience-centric approach whereby respondents could enter names that they considered news sources to them, even if they did not meet accepted standards or definitions within academia or the journalistic profession. This means that many of the names we list here would perhaps have been excluded under a more top-down approach.
How definitive is the order of the named individuals in each country?
In some cases, especially near the bottom the list, differences in the number of mentions for individuals are very small. Given our survey methodology, and the associated margin of error, the precise rank order should be read as indicative rather than definitive. Many other individuals were mentioned by respondents in the context of news, even if they do not make the top 15 using our approach. The lists should therefore be seen as indicative of some of the top news individuals in each country.
Why are some popular individuals with high follower counts lower down the list than individuals with high follower counts?
There are a number of possible reasons for this. First, some popular creators such as musicians and comedians are known more for entertainment than for news and their follower counts are often higher as a result. This means that even if they do occasionally talk about news related issues, not all of their followers will be aware of it. Second, some individuals working for traditional media may have relatively low personal followings but are widely distributed via social accounts of news brands. Third, there is a margin of error in surveys such as this (see previous answer) that needs to be borne in mind.
Did you exclude any individuals or other entries as part of the process?
Our lists are inclusive in terms of being faithful to the individual names mentioned by respondents. We removed just a handful of actors, sports stars, and celebrities if we were sure they did not post on any news-related issues. In most cases this did not affect the top 15 names that are published in this report for each country.
Many creators operate as part of collectives or use pseudonyms. How did you deal with these categorisation issues?
In terms of creator collectives or social-first brands, such as the Daily Wire (US) or TLDR News (UK) we followed the lead of our respondents. Where audiences have identified them as individuals, we have tended to categorise these as creators rather than news brands, but where they have mentioned a brand, we included them in our list of news brands. Where it was clear, however, that the brand is the work of one individual (e.g. Es.decirdiario/Sheila Hernández in Spain) we categorised them as an individual and made the connection clear in the description. Many creators use pseudonyms and, in these cases, we combined mentions of these with the real names. Again, we tried to make the connection clear in the description.
How did you deal with politicians and the overlap between politicians and political commentary?
Politicians and businesspeople are also frequently mentioned by survey respondents in the context of news sources on social media, and often have significant followings (e.g. on X, Donald Trump has 109m, Narendra Modi 109m, and Elon Musk 225m). Many politicians are also content creators and commentators who shape public debates. Some content creators have become politicians, and vice versa. We chose to include politicians if they were named by respondents in the context of news, but we have also shaded serving (or recently serving) politicians in grey to make clear the different relationship they often have with news consumers.