How social media in India has facilitated spread of fake and hateful political content

Harsh Mander

When powerful and extensively financed political parties join hands with social media giants, both benefit formidably. A study by the Tech Justice Law Project (TJLP) that focused on the Jharkhand state assembly elections of 2024 observed that a huge proportion of expenditure on political advertisements was by usually anonymous ‘shadow advertisers’. Shadow political advertising is undisclosed spending on behalf of a political candidate or party. This is not allowed in Indian law, but still thrives on social media. Significantly, the study found only the BJP resorted to shadow advertising, and that too on a massive scale, and not any other political party.

The study found that Meta’s platforms allowed the BJP and its shadow advertisers to brazenly violate Indian law and Meta’s own stated policies. This shadow pages put out almost five times the number of advertisements as the official BJP Jharkhand account and registered four times as many views. Taken together, what BJP and affiliated shadow accounts spent on Meta accounted for 75 percent of all ad-spend on political ads on the platform. The total official ad-spend by BJP and its affiliated accounts on Meta for the three months leading into the Jharkhand elections was approximately Rs 2.25 crores.

The official BJP pages spoke of government policies, programmes and pledges, while the shadow accounts went into the shadowy and unlawful territory of demonizing religious minorities—mainly Muslims and sometimes Christians—and propagating hate against them based on inflammatory fake news and prejudices. In an animated video, for instance, people in saffron, representing Hindus, were shown running away in fear from men in green, representing Muslims. Opposition leaders were also trashed and dehumanized; for instance, Chief Minister Hemant Soren was shown with horns on his head.

Such shadow advertisements violate many Indian election laws and courts rulings. They break the prescribed limits on election spending by candidates, and also the directive that every political advertisement should be certified by the Election Commission before it is released.