How a shadowy Meta, YouTube black market clouds India election integrity

Some of India’s top social election ad spenders are Facebook pages bought and sold in violation of the company’s rules, an Al Jazeera investigation reveals.

New Delhi, India – In 2019, political consultant Tushar Giri found himself in a room with a distraught veteran leader from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

The politician was a five-time legislator and, until a few days before that meeting, had been a chief ministerial candidate from a state. But he had lost in state legislature elections. The leader’s team, Giri recalled, “had no idea” how he had lost. As they plotted his political resurrection after the defeat, they had one clear demand of Giri, he said. “The first thing they said was, ‘We need to buy some shadow Facebook pages and dent the narrative.’”

Giri plucked out just the Facebook page they were looking for: Built and run by his firm, it focused on the BJP’s Hindu majoritarian talking points while masquerading as a current-affairs dump. The page amassed nearly 800,000 followers before it became defunct after the BJP unceremoniously retired the leader from electoral politics.

Then came the 2024 election campaign, and Giri found the perfect buyer for that page: a political turncoat in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh who had switched over to the BJP from the opposition and was now looking to find his footing among far-right voters. With a new look and feel – but with the old posts still in place – this page has now become a vehicle to promote the Madhya Pradesh politician, a former federal minister.

As India’s mammoth seven-phase election comes to an end with voting on June 1, an Al Jazeera investigation, and recent studies by researchers from nonprofit human