By Abhishek Kumar

With the 2024 Lok Sabha elections barely a few weeks away, political campaigns have reached a fever pitch both on the ground and virtually. With India ranking very high on the list of countries with the largest number of Internet users in the world, parties have recognized the power of social media and are investing significant sums into their digital campaigns. Consequently, social media advertisements have come up as a crucial means for parties to communicate with the electorate.

Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and others provide advertisers with enough information to run targeted advertisements reaching millions of voters. These targeted advertisements are based on factors such as location, demographics, interests, language, and behaviour, to achieve maximum impact.

Methodology

Alt News filtered data from the top 100 pages that spent the most on political advertisements in the last 90 days, as published by the Meta Ad Library on March 19 of this year. Advertisements run by leaders in their personal capacity were excluded from this data. Rahul Gandhi’s page is included in this data because the disclaimer in the advertisements run by him mentions the name of the Congress party.

Political advertisements on Facebook pages are of two types: official party pages, which share posts and propaganda according to party lines, and other pages that support a particular party through all posts and advertisements but do not have any official affiliation with the party. The expenditures on advertisements by these pages are not accounted for by the Election Commission. We have categorized such pages as proxy pages.

Analysis of this data revealed that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has spent the most on political advertisements, but the expenditure on advertisements by BJP’s proxy pages exceeded that on their official advertisements.

Read Full Story https://www.altnews.in/bjps-proxy-pages-spending-more-money-in-political-ads-on-facebook-and-instagram-than-official-pages/