Congress and its candidates officially placed 30,374 advertisements by paying at least 64.4 million rupees ($840,897), which got them more than 1.1 billion views. In comparison, the contribution of ghost and surrogate advertisers for Congress, the BJP’s main opponent, was minuscule. These advertisements got more than a whopping 1.31 billion views. That apart, at least 23 ghost and surrogate advertisers also placed 34,884 advertisements for which they paid Facebook more than 58.3 million rupees ($761,246), mostly to promote the BJP or denigrate its opposition, without disclosing their real identities or their affiliation with the party. TRC found the BJP and its candidates officially placed 26,291 advertisements by spending at least 104 million rupees ($1.36m), for which they got more than 1.36 billion views on Facebook. Apart from the parliamentary elections, this period saw assembly elections in several states, including Delhi, Odisha, Bihar, Haryana and Maharashtra. The Reporters’ Collective (TRC), a non-profit media organisation based in India, and ad.watch, a research project studying political advertisements on social media, mapped all the advertisers that have spent more than 500,000 rupees ($6,529) on political advertisements on Facebook between February 2019 and November 2020, using the Ad Library’s Application Programming Interface (API), Meta’s “transparency” tool that allows access to political advertising data across its platforms.
These ghost and surrogate advertisers got almost as many views as the advertisements officially placed by India’s governing party, doubling its visibility without the party having to take responsibility for the content or the expenditure related to their advertisements. New Delhi, India – Facebook allowed a large number of ghost and surrogate advertisers to secretly fund the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) election campaigns in India and boost the governing party’s visibility, according to an analysis of advertisements placed on the social media platform across 22 months and 10 elections.Īdvertisers either hid their identities or their connections with the BJP, even as they paid tens of millions of rupees to Facebook, mostly to show advertisements that promoted India’s ruling party and its leaders.
0 kommentar(er)
