American social media company Facebook’s algorithm provided the NDA government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi with cheaper advertising deals than other political parties. This was revealed in an analysis of ad spend spanning 22 months and 10 elections. It was also reported that in nine out of 10 elections (including the 2019 national parliamentary election, in which the BJP won) the party was charged less for advertisements than its opponents.
India’s non-profit media organization The Reporters’ Collective (TRC) and research project Ad Watch (ad.watch), a research project that looks into political advertisements on social media, reported nearly half-life on Facebook between February 2019 and November 2020. Analyzed the data for five lakh 36 thousand 70 political advertisements put on. This data was accessed through the Ad Library App Programming Interface (API), which is a type of transparency tool from Meta Platforms Inc. and allows access to data containing political advertisements on its platform.
Aljazeera (aljazeera.com) reported that Facebook charged the BJP, its candidates and affiliated organizations Rs 41,844 ($546) for showing the ad an average of one million (1 million) times. But the main opposition Congress, its candidates and affiliated organizations had to pay Rs 53,776 (about 29 percent more) for the same number of aids.
TRC and Ad.watch mainly compared BJP with Congress because they were the biggest spenders on political advertisements. In the 22 months (for which data is available), the BJP and its allies spent a total of more than 104.1 million rupees ($1.36 million) advertising on Facebook through their official pages. At the same time, Congress and its allies spent 64.4 million rupees ($841,000).
Meanwhile, Congress interim president Sonia Gandhi termed the “planned influence” of social media companies on the country’s electoral politics as a threat to democracy. On Wednesday (March 16, 2022), he said that the government should put an end to this. He raised this issue during Zero Hour in Lok Sabha. Also referring to some international media groups alleged that social media companies are being misused with the connivance of the ruling party. Gandhi said that social media is being misused to ‘hack’ democracy.
“The manner in which social harmony is being disturbed through Facebook and other social media platforms with the connivance of the ruling party, is a threat to our democracy… There is a collusion between big industrial groups and the government,” he claimed. “The government is urged to put an end to the systematic influence being exerted by Facebook and other social media in conjunction with the ruling establishment on the electoral politics of the world’s most democracy,” the president said. He said that the democracy and social harmony of the country has to be preserved.