YouTube and Facebook let India down during the Lok Sabha election
₹19.38 crore on Facebook and Instagram, and the Congress spent at least ₹10.88 crore. Similarly, the BJP spent at least ₹85.8 crore, and the Congress at least ₹45.4 crore on Google, including YouTube. The ad repositories of Google and Meta, which are not as transparent as they should be, and only tell part of the story, show that the two companies earned 9-10 digit figures from just two major political parties between February and May 2024.
In the lead-up to the election, Google pledged to support the democratic process by enforcing policies against false claims. However, an investigation by Global Witness and Access Now shows that YouTube approved 100% of submitted ads containing election disinformation—including content that could result in vote suppression or plausibly even incite violence—in English, Hindi and Telugu, violating its content policies. In contrast, YouTube had rejected such ads before the 2022 US midterm elections, pointing to a disparity in policy enforcement between regions and potentially reflecting internal choices on resource allocation to pre-poll supervision in the US over that in India.
Meta also seems to have failed its self-regulation test. Civil society organizations found that Meta approved 14 out of 22 ads with inflammatory content within 24 hours, despite public commitments to detect and remove violative AI-generated content. Most users seeking to upload such content are not researchers, and do not withdraw before publication.
The potential harm from such content reaching millions is significant. These examples are part of a broader pattern of large platforms placing profits over other concerns. The writing is on the wall for India’s new government and other democracies: Self-regulation by
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