Facebook’s algorithm grossly favours Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) advertisements because of the divisive nature of the content, as revealed by part four of a year-long investigation conducted by Kumar Sambhav of The Reporters’ Collective (TRC) and Nayantara Ranganathan of ad.watch, a research project that studies political ads on social media.
The first three parts of the investigation focused on how Facebook helps BJP in the digital space by promoting advertisements from its surrogates. The first part of the investigation found that Facebook carried 718 surrogate political ads of Reliance Jio-funded New Emerging World of Journalism Limited promoting the BJP and denigrating its rivals costing Rs 52,00,000 viewed more than 290 million times in those 22 months.
The second part of the investigation discovered that at least 23 ghost and surrogate advertisers paid more than Rs 5.8 crore to Facebook to run 34,884 ads either to promote
— source newsclick.in | 17 Mar 2022