In the run-up to the Bihar elections, undisclosed shadow campaigns ran unchecked on Meta, while several candidates with large online followings continued to monetise their content. In doing so, both parties and candidates violated Meta’s own monetisation rules and the Election Commission of India’s guidelines, with no visible action from either side.
Two new reports by Democratic Charkha and the National Alliance of People’s Movement Bihar detail how these violations stack up across the board, from candidates failing to disclose revenue from monetised pages to political parties routing spending through unverifiable “news” pages and fan accounts.
Together, the findings show how Meta is enabling opaque political advertising with almost no accountability, while allowing candidates to derive financial benefits through features that should have been disabled according to their policies.
Campaign Monetisation Is Prohibited. These Candidates Kept Earning.
One of the reports identifies 76 candidates with active Facebook or Instagram accounts. Eleven of them were found to be monetised or participating in Meta’s creator programmes. Out of these eleven, only one candidate—singer-turned-politician Maithili Thakur—declared that her main source of income is from social media.
Researchers note that some candidates are likely earning more from Meta during the campaign period than they are spending on campaign activities. This includes revenue from reels, ads in videos, and subscription features.
Meta’s Partner Monetisation Policies explicitly bar payment-sharing programmes and revenue tools for anyone running “regulated political communications” or content that falls under “political or issue advertising.” The policy states:
“Communications that are regulated as political advertising under applicable law are also ineligible for monetisation features.”
In practice, this means pages operated by sitting politicians, candidates, or accounts actively promoting them during the campaign period should be automatically disqualified from monetisation. Yet the reports show multiple such accounts remained monetised, and identify three recurring patterns:
- Celebrity entertainers entering politics, such as Khesari Yadav (RJD) and Maithili Thakur (BJP). Both built massive online followings long before contesting elections. Khesari Yadav’s Facebook page has been monetised since 2019 and remained so even after he filed nomination papers, while Thakur’s page stopped monetising. Yadavl’s political reels—including one rally clip with 10 million views—continue to generate visible revenue indicators.
- Influencer-first candidates, including Manish Kashyap (Jan Suraaj) and Pushpam Priya (Plurals Party). Their political visibility is inseparable from their online presence, and both maintain monetised channels.
- Incumbent officials, such as Krishna Kumar Mantoo (BJP) and Prem Shankar Yadav (RJD). Their reels feature official events, “janata darshan” meetings, roadshows in government vehicles, and AI-generated videos. Both pages offer Facebook subscription features at ₹89 per month. In these cases, the reports flag a clear concern: if public resources are being used to film or edit reels of government work, and these reels are monetised, revenue ends up in the personal accounts of sitting officials.
The Persistent Shadow Ad Ecosystem
The second report (link here) maps how political parties are supplementing official advertising with large, unaccounted spends routed through shadow pages. Official political ad spending in Bihar amounted to ₹7.8 crore, led by BJP Bihar (₹5.6 crore).
On top of this, the researchers identify about ₹3 crore in shadow advertising—ads linked to political narratives but lacking proper verification or declaration to the ECI. The report further categorised these pages into three groups:
- News-like pages such as Bihar Live and Today Bihar News, which present partisan content in the form of vox pops.
- Candidate fan pages that add significant undeclared spend, including multiple pages supporting BJP’s Samrat Choudhary, whose unofficial pages contributed roughly 20% additional ad spend over his official page.
- Anonymous attack pages, including Bhak Budbak and Jungle Raj, which ran caste-targeted and dehumanising content aimed at the Yadav family, with inadequate advertiser transparency.
BOOM has extensively reported on surrogate pages running undisclosed political ads on Meta, which can be found here, here, here, and here.
Government pages and pre-election activity
The reports also tracked ₹23.6 lakh spent by Bihar government department pages in the months leading up to the election.
These accounts, which were mostly inactive earlier, became active again just before the polls, pushing content aligned with official government messaging. The spending increase strongly correlates with the election timeline.
Technical Fix, Missing Enforcement
According to the authors, the influencer-monetisation problem is straightforward to fix. Meta already collects PAN details to activate monetisation, and candidates already submit PAN information and their social-media handles to the ECI. The researchers propose a simple cross-matching process that would automatically disable monetisation during the campaign period and restore it for losing candidates once the election ends.
They also recommend that platforms publicly disclose which political accounts are monetised, and that the ECI make its communication with social-media companies available for public scrutiny.
Across both reports, the authors point to the same underlying issue: weak enforcement on platform policy, advertiser verification and candidate disclosures allows monetisation and shadow advertising to run in parallel throughout the election cycle. As a result, political communication and political revenue flow through the same systems, with little transparency around how either is being regulated.
