NEW DELHI: A Reliance-funded media-tech company NEWJ promoted surrogate advertisements on Facebook to boost the reach and popularity of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP in the lead up to the 2019 general elections, a report in Al Jazeera has charged. Facebook apparently allowed the firm reportedly funded by Reliance to take advantage of legal loopholes to publish surrogate advertisements in favour of the BJP and help it reach a wider audience, it went on to state.
Publishing surrogate or ghost advertisements that favour a political candidate but are not directly funded or authorised by that candidate is a crime under Indian law. But the Election Commission of India (ECI) does not extend this ban to digital platforms, like Facebook, despite being aware of the loophole for years, as a Right to Information (RTI) application by The Reporters' Collective, a non-profit media organisation that reports on issues of public interest, showed.
"For that matter, Facebook's parent Meta too did not implement this rule, allowing Reliance-funded NEWJ to quietly promote BJP and its candidates on Facebook and Instagram during the elections," the report by Kumar Sambhav of The Reporters' Collective and Nayantara Ranganathan of ad.watch stated.
NEWJ is an acronym for New Emerging World of Journalism Limited.
NEWJ founder Shalabh Upadhyay and his kin reportedly have close ties with both the BJP and Reliance.
According to The Reporters' Collective, advertisements placed by NEWJ "triggered anti-Muslim sentiments, attacked BJP’s opponents and critics through distorted information and eulogised Modi government. Though it is illegal to publish such surrogate ads under Indian laws, loopholes in how the Election Commission applies the law give social media platforms a free pass."
The selective application of Facebook's rules and processes allowed India’s largest conglomerate to pump in millions of rupees to place and promote these surrogate advertisements. This boosted the reach and popularity of PM Modi and the BJP in the lead up to not just the 2019 parliamentary elections but also nine state elections, the report stated.
When Facebook did crack down on surrogate advertisements, ostensibly to ensure transparency and accountability, it did so by mostly targeting advertisers promoting BJP’s main opponent, Congress, but allowed pages like NEWJ to continue, it was reported.
Over the past year, The Reporters' Collective and ad.watch, a research project studying political ads on social media, analysed data of all the 536,070 political advertisements placed on Facebook and Instagram from February 2019 through November 2020 to assess the influence of Facebook’s political advertising policies on elections in the country.
They accessed the data through Facebook’s Ad Library Application Programming Interface (API) and found that in those 22 months, which included the high-octane 2019 national election and nine state elections.
Facebook’s advertising platform systematically undercut the political competition in the world’s largest electoral democracy, giving an unfair advantage to the BJP over its competitors, the report noted.