Why the allegations about Facebook favouring the BJP are so significant for Indian politics
Addressing the Bharatiya Janata Party’s social media workers in Rajasthan in September 2018, Amit Shah made startling revelations about how the party’s famed social media machine operates. “We are capable of delivering any message we want to the public, whether sweet or sour, true or fake,” he claimed.
This was not an empty boast. He spoke of an instance where a BJP worker had made a fake story go viral in the run-up to the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections in 2017. The story claimed that Akhilesh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party who was chief minister at the time had slapped his father, Mulayam Singh. “We were able to do this only because we had 32 lakh people in our WhatsApp groups,” said Shah.
As is evident, social media in India is flooded with posts favouring the BJP. Several of the stories are fake. Some even find a way into traditional news outlets.
A close relationship
A report on Friday by the US newspaper, The Wall Street Journal could help explain how the BJP has been so successful at its campaigns in the virtual world. The newspaper alleged that Facebook, the largest social media company in the world, which also owns WhatsApp, the most popular social messaging app in India, had...
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