The fact that the BJP has been outscoring its rivals on social media is well-documented, but the latest figures released by Facebook show the party is also out-spending them significantly. Recently, FB published an ‘Ad Library report’, a database that “includes ads related to politics and issues of national importance”, as an effort to increase “transparency”. So how and where does it stack up?
Well, some 900 million Indians will vote in the polls of 2019. And data portal Statista estimates 294 million Indians have FB accounts—even if not all are of voting age, this approaches one-third, a huge subset, all of 2014’s winning voteshare in fact.
The numbers boggle the mind. Out of the 2,500 pages FB listed data for, 35 pages had spent over Rs 1 lakh between February 7 and March 2, barely a month. Of these 35 pages, 19 are affiliated with the BJP and the central government and have spent Rs 2.48 crore out of the total...
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