How a Reliance-Funded Firm Boosts BJP’s Campaigns on Facebook Kumar Sambhav and Nayantara Ranganathan
March 27, 2022 https://janataweekly.org/how-a-reliance-funded-firm-boosts-bjps-campaigns-on-facebook/
Loopholes in how the Election Commission of India (ECI) applies the law and a 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 to boost the reach and popularity of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP in the lead up to the 2019 parliamentary elections and nine state elections. Surrogate advertisements promote a political candidate but are not directly funded or authorised by that candidate.
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.
The Reporters’ Collective (TRC), a non-profit media organisation based in India, 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.
Facebook allowed a firm funded by Reliance to work the legal loophole to publish surrogate advertisements in favour of the BJP and help it reach a wider audience.
From February 2019 through November 2020, NEWJ placed 718 political advertisements over a period of 22 months and 10 elections, that collectively were viewed more than 290 million times by Facebook users, according to the Ad Archive data. The company spent 5.2 million rupees ($67,899) on these advertisements.
Many of these advertisements lit the fuse of anti-Muslim and anti-Pakistan sentiments, Tommy-gunned BJP’s opponents and critics, and eulogised Modi’s government.
2018. In mid-November, Reliance Group company Reliance Industrial Investment and Holdings Limited (RIIHL) took over NEWJ with a 75 percent equity stake. It then lent the company 84 million rupees ($1.1m) via convertible debentures. NEWJ ended the financial year in March 2019 with revenues of a paltry 3.37 million rupees ($44,003) on which it netted a net loss of 22.06 million rupees ($288,046).
Next year, Reliance pumped in another 125 million rupees ($1.63m) again through debentures in NEWJ. For the financial year ending March 2020, NEWJ did not record any revenues but did have advertising promotional expenses of 27.3 million rupees ($356,467), up from 6.06 million rupees ($79,128) the previous year.
Jio lent another 84.96 million rupees ($1.12m) to NEWJ at a negligible 0.0001 percent annual interest rate in the financial year ending March 2021.
ECI and Facebook shut eyes
To insulate elections from money power, Indian election laws cap the money a candidate can spend on campaigns. If a third party, with no declared association with the candidate, pays for that candidate’s advertisements in print and electronic media, the ECI considers it as the candidate’s spending. The ECI also investigates instances where paid promotions are camouflaged as news in the traditional media. If found that a piece of “news” was indeed paid for to promote a candidate, the ECI adds the actual or notional expenditure on the advertisement to the candidate’s election expenses.
These rules, however, are not applied to the advertisements placed on social media.
In 2013, the ECI made it mandatory for all political parties, candidates and their authorised agents to get social media advertisements pre-certified from the commission and report the expenditure on them. But it kept the advertisements placed by third parties, entities not officially linked to the candidates, out of this regulation, leaving the window open for surrogate advertisements.
In its October 25, 2013 order, the ECI said social media was part of the electronic media and the advertisements would be regulated in a similar fashion. But it added that it was still considering how to deal with content posted by people other than the candidates and their parties “in so far as they relate to, or can be reasonably connected with, the election campaigning of political parties and candidates”.