In 2019, political consultant Tushar Giri was approached by a veteran leader from Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) who had recently suffered a defeat in state legislature elections and needed help with his political resurrection. The leader’s team demanded the purchase of shadow Facebook pages to influence the narrative. Giri had the perfect page for them, built by his firm, which focused on the BJP’s Hindu majoritarian talking points. This page gained nearly 800,000 followers before being retired by the BJP after the leader’s exit from electoral politics.
During the 2024 election campaign, Giri found a buyer for the page: a political turncoat in Madhya Pradesh looking to appeal to far-right voters. The page, with a new look but old posts intact, now promotes the Madhya Pradesh politician. An investigation by Al Jazeera and studies by human rights monitoring groups reveal a black market of Facebook pages being bought and sold to influence voters in India, bypassing Meta’s scrutiny of political advertising.
Despite Meta’s rules against selling or buying accounts or operating under false identities, these surrogate pages have flourished during India’s election season. They allow owners to avoid Meta’s scrutiny of new political advertisers, spreading posts targeting religious minorities, conspiracy theories, and election disinformation. Facebook’s largest market, India has seen these pages become crucial for political campaigns, especially during crises, as insiders confirm the existence of a parallel business model during elections.
The black market of surrogate pages benefits political campaigns in evading Meta’s review mechanism for political ads. By buying existing pages with verification, campaigns can avoid the scrutiny faced by new advertisers. While the scale of this business is hard to quantify, nearly half of the top 20 political ad spenders on Facebook are surrogate pages run by organizations hiding their identities.
Not just the BJP, but opposition parties like the Congress also use these pages. However, BJP-aligned pages dominate the top spenders. Independent researchers have discovered a coordinated effort on the far-right to exploit this black market, with networks of pages pushing content favoring the BJP and Modi. An investigation exposed far-right networks coordinating with each other to spread Islamophobic and divisive narratives targeting opposition leaders and minority groups.
In the lead-up to the 2024 elections, researchers identified 22 of the top 100 ad spenders as far-right pages supporting Modi and the BJP, with a total spend exceeding $1 million. Despite attempts to contact these top spenders, many were inaccessible, with websites lacking substantial content. Far-right pages like Ulta Chasma amassed millions of interactions and views, with researchers noting a consistent promotion of divisive narratives and Islamophobic tropes.