By Team
While political advertising on social media is a contentious topic all across the world, they are even more contentious in Global Majority countries. India exemplifies this because a massive chunk of spends on political ads are by “shadow advertisers”: untraceable advertisers who routinely put out disinformation and inciteful content demonizing India’s minorities, especially Muslims, and slandering political leaders. All of this is occurring openly in ways that can be traced and studied using the ad libraries published by platforms. In particular, shadow advertisers have had great success on Meta’s platforms due to lax policies that allow all kinds of actors to put out political ads with very few checks.
Drawing on the methodology employed in civil society reports during the 2024 national election in India, this report considers the upcoming election in the Eastern state of Jharkhand to show how Meta continues to PERMIT illegal political advertising despite repeated warnings; PROFITS from millions of rupees spent by anonymous and unverified spreaders of hatred and disinformation; and PROMOTES shadow ads by showing it to more people than official political ads.
This story was originally published in techjusticelaw.org.