New Delhi, India – Facebook allowed a large number of ghost and surrogate advertisers to secretly fund the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) election campaigns in India and boost the governing party’s visibility, according to an analysis of advertisements placed on the social media platform across 22 months and 10 elections.
Advertisers either hid their identities or their connections with the BJP, even as they paid tens of millions of rupees to Facebook, mostly to show advertisements that promoted India’s ruling party and its leaders. These ghost and surrogate advertisers got almost as many views as the advertisements officially placed by India’s governing party, doubling its visibility without the party having to take responsibility for the content or the expenditure related to their advertisements.
