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Vittoria ElliottDavid Gilbert
In 2017, Pratik Sinha and Mohammed Zubair co-founded fact-checking site AltNews in India. Almost immediately, the two men were the target of persistent and ferocious attacks through the far-right news site OpIndia. Many of the attacks claimed that Zubair, a Rohingya Muslim who had immigrated illegally to India, and that his cousin was a rapist. In several headlines, the site described Zubair as an “Islamist” who spreads fake news.
This was not far from OpIndia’s other coverage: in addition to targeting journalists and news sites critical of the government, OpIndia pre-classified conspiracy announcements and sometimes outright disinformation, specifically targeting the country’s minority Muslim population. Founded in 2014, OpIndia is audited through key lawmakers from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Hindu Nationalist Party (BJP), and the site admits that it is funded in part through classified ads posted through the BJP. With classified ads of millions of Indians voting in elections across the country, critics fear that OpIndia’s election misinformation and overt aid to the Modi government could further undermine the democratic process. The online page has in the past echoed Modi’s widely criticized description of the Muslim vote as a “vote for jihad. “
Yet, despite this, U. S. tech companies, which have regulations that oppose hate speech and misinformation, continue to offer OpIndia and, in some cases, allow it to continue to make money from advertising. OpIndia has a strong presence on Facebook, Instagram, and X. In addition, a new report, shared exclusively with WIRED, revealed that Google’s advertising platform is being used to partially fund OpIndia’s operation.
“In a polarized space, they are creating a vicious narrative against you,” Sinha told WIRED. “This is all a narrative construction. Their job is to smear anyone who criticizes the government, and that’s what they do. “
Despite repeated efforts by activists to remove the investment from the site, and the fact that publications that were part of Shakti, an election fact-checking initiative backed by Google, verified OpIndia’s articles and found that it published fake news, OpIndia continues to operate. component of the classified ads that Google’s ad-sharing platform places next to your content. In 2019, the Poynter International Fact-Checking Network, which accredits publications as trusted arbiters of information, rejected OpIndia’s request.
“Google’s own publisher policies prohibit the monetization of content that incites hatred, racism, or discrimination against an individual or group,” says Sarah Kay Wiley, director of policy and partnerships at Check My Ads, an author and nonprofit online advertising watchdog. . of the new report. ” Google also states that it does not monetize or work with publishers who make false claims and who may especially undermine what is accepted as true in an election or democratic process. “
Ad exchanges allow publishers to sell ad space and advertisers to buy it through a fully automated process that takes place seconds before it is loaded. Ad distributors and buyers set value and spend limits, and Google keeps a cut of all transactions. Due to the automated nature of the procedure, advertisers will most likely not realize that their products appear to contain misleading and hateful content.
By Kim Zetter
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Other ad exchanges such as Magnite have ceased to work with OpIndia. If Google were to stop working with OpIndia, Wiley says, “it would have a big impact. “
On Facebook, OpIndia has pages in English and Hindi, with 310,000 fans and 431,000 language fans respectively. Both pages imply that their administrator is Aadhyaasi Media and Content Services Private Limited, which owns OpIndia.
On its Hindi page, OpIndia has shared stories promoting the conspiracy theory of “love jihad,” in which Muslim men attempt to marry, seduce or kidnap Hindus in order to force them to convert and create a demographic replacement in Hindu-majority India. , and encouraged false claims, adding that a new inheritance law would reallocate wealth from Hindus to Muslims. Meta spokeswoman Erin McPike said whether the content violated Meta’s policies or whether Meta took into account violations of the Hindi page when comparing the English page.
These stories are then collected and disseminated on other platforms, such as X and Telegram, explains Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan, an analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. “In some of those places, there are even more particular calls for violence against Muslims or the expulsion of Muslims,” he says. The site also has overseas appeal: WIRED was able to locate OpIndia articles shared on non-Indian right-wing channels on Telegram, adding a pro-Kremlin channel with more than 1. 3 million subscribers and conspiracy channels. with thousands of followers.
He is also very active on the social network X with the official account OpIndia, which has 688,000 subscribers. OpIndia appears to be paying for X Premium, giving it a blue tick, but hasn’t responded if it subscribes to the service. WIRED has known about it at least a dozen OpIndia writers, columnists and editors, adding editor-in-chief Nupur Sharma, who has more than 680,000 subscribers, who appear to be subscribers to X Premium.
Sharma did not respond to a question about OpIndia monetizing its content through X Premium, and the company itself did not respond either.
“It’s a hyper-partisan right-wing media outlet that was created by claiming that India’s mainstream media has a liberal bias, very similar to what American right-wing media say about pro-journalism in America,” Kalyani Chadha said. a far-right media outlet. Associate professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism who published an in-depth report in 2020 on India’s right-wing media ecosystem that included OpIndia. “They offer themselves as a news outlet, but there aren’t a lot of original reports. Many of them are comments and opinions.
In addition to Sinha and Zubair, OpIndia targets journalists and media outlets it considers to be “far-left. “In a single article, the site’s team indexed Indian journalists and publications allegedly linked to billionaire George Soros, who has long been the target of global attention. far-right plots. In another, they attacked veteran journalist Ravish Kumar, falsely accusing him of sympathizing with the perpetrators of a rape case in 2019. OpIndia has also spent years attacking Raqib Hameed Naik, an Indian journalist and founder of India Hate Lab. , which documents cases of hate speech and conspiracies targeting Indian minority communities. According to him, this was made even more complicated by sharing items through government officials.
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“The purpose is to magnify this misinformation, and the BJP leaders percentage it, so that other people think it’s genuine,” says Naik. “In the long run, it allows you to reveal to a critic, to a journalist, that this user is bad, because there are reports contrary to him. “
When WIRED reached out to OpIndia for comment, Sharma responded to our emailed questions by posting his answers on X.
When asked about hate speech and misinformation on his site, Sharma wrote: “Our critics are most commonly Islamists, jihadists, terrorists, leftists and their sympathizers, like you. We don’t care about any of them. He then added that “Islamophobia does not exist” and referred to an OpIndia article laying out his position. Sharma added that “no” is his business when asked if OpIndia funds through the BJP. Sharma’s post also tagged one of the authors of this story, who then faced a torrent of abuse from Sharma’s supporters.
For years, activists and researchers have tried to shed light on problematic content posted through OpIndia. A campaign in 2020 by the British advocacy organization Stop Funding Hate led several advertisers to remove their classified ads from the site. Google claims, however, that content posted on the site doesn’t appear to violate its own rules.
“All sites in our network, adding Opindia, will have to comply with our publisher policies, which explicitly prohibit classified ads from appearing next to content that promotes hate speech, violence, or patently false statements that may harm what is accepted as true with or participation in an election,” said Michael Aciman, Google spokesperson. “Publishers are also subject to normal controls, and we actively block or remove classified ads for any infringing content. “
Despite this, users can locate classified ads from Temu or the Palm Beach Post along with many of OpIndia’s articles peddling conspiracies and Islamophobia, posted on advertising exchanges such as Google’s Ad Manager, which is the market leader.
Facebook, on the other hand, Wiley says, is more of a “walled garden. “Once a publisher meets the company’s monetization criteria, adding having more than 1,000 subscribers, they can make money from the classified ads on the page.
While researchers who spoke to WIRED couldn’t say precisely how much the site has earned from Google Ads and Facebook monetization, they said OpIndia most likely doesn’t rely on ad sharing alone for its revenue. As it turns out, as with many media outlets in India, some of this investment is made in the form of more classic advertising from a major client: the government.
“A lot of India’s traditional press relies on government advertising to survive,” says Prashanth Bhat, a professor of media studies at the University of Houston. “These revenues contribute to the survival of mainstream media outlets in a hyper-competitive media environment like India’s. We have around 400 24/7 television news channels in other languages and more than 10,000 newspapers registered in India. To survive, they surely want the support of the government. “
Sharma showed that OpIndia relies in part on government announcements. “Literally, each and every media space receives publicity from the political components,” Sharma said. “In fact, a portion of your salary can also be funded through those components and/or your supporters. Get off your best horse.
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However, the BJP has also tried to help OpIndia in other ways. In 2019, the BJP reached out directly to Meta and asked the company to allow OpIndia to monetize on Facebook. Meta spokesperson McPike told WIRED that OpIndia’s English-language page has yet to be monetized, but monetization is not allowed on its Hindi page lately “due to violations of our policies. “
“To monetize on Facebook, Pages will need to comply with our Community Standards, Partner Monetization Policies, and Content Monetization Policies,” McPike says.
Google did not respond to WIRED’s questions about whether it had ever won a similar request from the Indian government. Google’s Aciman says, “As we do with all publishers, we’ve already taken page-level mention action on this site when we see policy violations. Of course, we will continue our content infringement policies across our publisher network.
X did not respond to questions about whether OpIndia and its staff should monetize through X Premium or whether the company has already obtained requests from the government to fix content from OpIndia or its staff. The company has complied with several removal requests from the Indian government. Ban accounts or tweets critical of the government.
But Wiley says that without transparency from tech corporations about how they can make money from advertising (and how much), media outlets like OpIndia will continue to fall into oblivion.
“At the end of the day, the business style is advertising, and what we continue to see is that that business style is broken,” he says. “Advertisers don’t know where their money is going. And the biggest challenge is that a lot of this data is funneled into erroneous data online. “
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