A media startup owned by Asia’s richest billionaire has been accused of helping India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) win elections.
NEWJ, a subsidiary of Jio Platforms which is owned by Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Group, has paid for a series of advertisements on Facebook, according to a media investigation by the Reporters’ Collective. The campaign helped push the BJP’s agenda on Indian social media just before the 2019 parliamentary elections in the country.
The investigation, which studied all 536,070 political advertisements placed on Facebook and Instagram between February 2019 and November 2020, revealed that Ambani’s NEWJ constantly published surrogate or ghost advertisements that favoured the BJP.
Read the rest of this story on qz.com. Become a member to get unlimited access to Quartz’s journalism.
Originally published on Quartz : Original article