New Delhi, March 29, 2022 (PPI-OT):Journalists of The Reporters’ Collective who carried out an investigation into the political advertisements placed on Facebook found a hidden world of ghost and surrogate advertisers which promoted the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) during 2019 general elections and state elections till November 2020.

The investigation has been done by three journalists, Kumar Sambhav, Nayantara Ranganathan and Shreegireesh Jalihal. In a series of the tweets, Sambhav put out his key findings with regard to the political ads promoted by Facebook.

“We found a hidden world of ghost and surrogate advertisers that promoted BJP during elections without disclosing their identity or affiliation with the party. One such advertiser is a firm funded by Reliance Jio, India’s largest telecom company. More on that later,” said Sambhav.

Surrogate advertisement, which means placing ads that promote a political candidate but are not funded or authorised by that candidate, is a crime as per Indian law. The law aims to hold the candidates accountable for the content they put out, to prevent the inflow of funds in elections from unknown sources and to ensure the poll expenses of candidates stay within legal limits.

‘Paid news’ favouring a candidate also gets accounted for in this. However, the Elections Commission of India applies this law only in TV and Print media even though such ads flourish on social media, said Sambhav. US Whistle-blower had exposed that Facebook lobbied with the Election Commission for not to apply strict election regulation on social media.

Sambhav said Facebook claimed it acts against political advertisers who misrepresent their identity. In fact, it cracked down on surrogate campaigners before the parliamentary polls for “inauthentic behaviour”. But almost all its targets happened to be Congress’s surrogates and a minuscule of BJP.

In the name of crackdown against the surrogate advertisers, Facebook throttled Congress supporting ads while allowing the BJP to benefit from that. “One such surrogate advertiser, NEWJ, a Reliance Jio subsidiary, pumped millions into FB to promote the BJP. NEWJ claims to be a news company and denies placing political ads. But FB classified about 718 paid posts by NEWJ, which were disguised as news, as political ads,” said Sambhav.

NEWJ’s ads “peddled lies or misinformation or fired up religious or communal sentiments with one underlying theme – to promote BJP and its candidates. These ads were carefully spread out among a relentless stream of non-political, informational or slice-of-life videos”.

Apart from NEWJ, we found 22 more surrogate advertisers that paid more than 53.8 million to Facebook to promote the BJP. They got more than 1.3 billion views, almost equal to the views of BJP’s official ads. Many hid identities, but operated from BJP headquarters. Many had the same phone number, said Sambhav. Facebook did not just allow the BJP to promote surrogate advertisements but also “FB’s ad algorithm charged cheaper rates for BJP’s ads than all its competitors in 9/10 elections”.

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