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In a new book, Harsh Mander looks at the far-reaching consequences of hate speech on social media

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When powerful and extensively financed political parties join hands with social media giants, both benefit formidably. A study by the Tech Justice Law Project (TJLP) that focused on the Jharkhand state assembly elections of 2024 observed that a huge proportion of expenditure on political advertisements was by usually anonymous “shadow advertisers”. Shadow political advertising is undisclosed spending on behalf of a political candidate or party. This is not allowed in Indian law, but still thrives on social media. Significantly, the study found that only the BJP resorted to shadow advertising, and that too on a massive scale, and not any other political party.

The study found that Meta’s platforms allowed the BJP and its shadow advertisers to brazenly violate Indian law and Meta’s own stated policies. The shadow pages put out almost five times the number of advertisements as the official BJP Jharkhand account and registered four times as many views. Taken together, what BJP and affiliated shadow accounts spent on Meta accounted for 75% of all ad-spend on political ads on the platform. The total official ad-spend by BJP and its affiliated accounts on Meta for the three months leading into the Jharkhand elections was approximately Rs 2.25 crores.

The official BJP pages...