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Pages Supporting BJP Among Top 3 Advertisers on Facebook

The amount spent by these top 3 advertisers is estimated to be Rs 1.79 crore, with 1,913 ads running on Facebook.
Pages Supporting BJP Among Top 3 Advertisers on Facebook

Pages Supporting BJP Among Top 3 Advertisers on Facebook

Social media in recent years has become one of the crucial platforms for campaigning in the run up to elections. With full-fledged on-ground campaigns in place, there is also a robust social media campaign to ensure that the messaging reaches the target audience. Social Media Ads then have an important role to play in determining the reach and clicks of a particular post published on an official/unofficial political party page or handle.

In an attempt to increase transparency in advertising, Facebook started a platform called the Facebook Ad archive, that lists the highest spending advertisers and makes the report available to the public. The archives include ads related to politics and issues of national importance that have a run on Facebook or Instagram.

As the country gears up for the Lok Sabha elections 2019, lets take a look at a weekly summary with the data for ads viewed by people in India in the past week.

 

Approximately, Rs 2.57 crore have been spent by politically affiliated pages since February 2019.

Also Read: What Could Have Been Done With The Money Modi Government Spent On Advertising It’s Policies.

Interestingly, the top 3 highest spending advertisers are boosting content that propagates the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s messages or supports the party directly. The amount spent by these top 3 advertisers in particular is estimated to be Rs 1.79 crore, with 1,913 ads running on Facebook.

While the top 3 positions of the spending list remained with BJP supporting advertisers, what’s astounding is that 7 out of the top 10 and 13 out of the top 25 advertisers were also boosting posts supporting the BJP. Considering the fact that this is weekly data, it is safe to say that the Facebook Ad premises were dominated by BJP affiliated pages with more than 5000 ads running simultaneously.

In November last year, according to the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) data, the saffron party overtook major companies including Netflix to become the top advertiser on Indian television. This was prior to the assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Telangana and Mizoram. Now that the country is heading towards 2019 Lok Sabha Elections, there’s vigorous campaigning across mass media and social media.

In February, Facebook stated that it would extend some of its rules governing political advertisements to curb election interference in India, Nigeria, Ukraine and the European Union. Facebook has been effectively used in the past by politicians and their opponents to spread fake news and propaganda.

The huge spend on ad boosts and the number of active ads running on Facebook with such frequency speaks volumes of the dedication of the ruling party to bombard the users with their ‘word of mouth’.

While a Mahagathbandhan (Grand Alliance) is on the cards for the upcoming election and BJP adversaries are doing their bit to present an opposition, there seem to be no tough competition for the saffron party when it comes to social media and the usage of Facebook’s ad manager. It is quite apparent that the BJP is dominating the platform by all means.

Read More: Tech for Democracy in the Brave New Digital World

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