How Social Media Has Changed Indian Politics

India has approximately 750–800 million active internet users, of whom 535 million use WhatsApp, 467 million use YouTube, and 362 million use Instagram. These platforms have become the primary venues for political communication in a country where television reaches approximately 900 million but is increasingly supplemented and bypassed by mobile-first digital communication. The 2024 Lok Sabha election — conducted against a backdrop of this mass digital penetration — was described by researchers at Oxford Internet Institute as "a Modi-centric election" defined by "the strategic use of journalism, social media, and internet governance." 

Indian political parties, particularly the BJP, have developed sophisticated digital infrastructure: BJP manages over five million WhatsApp groups to distribute its election messaging; it has over 7.8 million Instagram followers; its IT Cell produces viral content in over 20 Indian languages simultaneously. No other Indian political party has comparable digital infrastructure.

Representational Image: How Social Media Has Changed Indian Politics

WhatsApp's specific characteristics make it the most consequential social media platform for Indian political communication — and the most difficult to regulate. Unlike Facebook or Instagram, where content is semi-public and algorithmically ranked, WhatsApp groups operate on end-to-end encryption in a relatively private setting where misinformation circulates without the audit trail or content moderation that public platforms provide. 

The 2019 Lok Sabha election saw significant WhatsApp-driven misinformation — including doctored videos, false attribution of statements to political leaders, and communal incitement that contributed to physical violence in several cases. The 2024 election added AI-generated deepfakes to this ecosystem: the World Economic Forum's 2024 Global Risk Report ranked India as the country with the highest risk of misinformation and disinformation globally.

What You Need to Know

• BJP manages approximately five million WhatsApp groups for election messaging, East Asia Forum (May 2024) reported; its IT Cell and affiliated volunteer networks produce and distribute political content in multiple Indian languages at scale; no other party has comparable digital mobilisation infrastructure.
• In the 2024 election, the government sent WhatsApp messages from a government-run account seeking feedback on Modi's welfare schemes — signed by Modi and including voice notes — to millions of voters before the election announcement; the ECI directed the government to stop but the incident illustrated the blurred line between government communication and campaign communication.
• Oxford Internet Institute (OII) research documented that AI-generated deepfakes appeared in Indian state elections in 2023–24, with political parties using synthetic media to create realistic videos of politicians making statements they never made; the ECI has no systematic regulatory mechanism for AI-generated political content.
• Sage Journals research (November 2025) found that the 2024 election was characterised by "an unprecedented wave of disinformation — deepfakes, doctored visuals, and communal hoaxes — disseminated across multilingual, mobile-first platforms"; fact-checkers operated as "retroactive gatekeepers" — intervening after misinformation had already gone viral rather than preventing its spread.
• TechPolicy.Press (May 2024) noted that BJP's WhatsApp advantage is structural: "It is all too common to see WhatsApp messages used to spread rumors that prey on community prejudices and turn those local sentiments into violence"; the encrypted, private-group format means the government cannot monitor content and platforms cannot enforce content moderation at scale.

How It Works in Practice

1. BJP's IT Cell as a political innovation: The BJP's IT Cell — established during Narendra Modi's Gujarat Chief Minister tenure and scaled nationally from 2012 onward — represents a systematic approach to digital political communication unprecedented in Indian politics. It produces content for different platforms (short videos for WhatsApp, longer videos for YouTube, memes for Instagram), in different languages, targeted at different demographic segments, on a daily basis. This content-production machinery, combined with the five million WhatsApp groups operated by party workers, creates a distribution network that makes BJP's messaging ubiquitous in the digital spaces where its supporters spend time.

2. WhatsApp as political communication infrastructure: WhatsApp groups function as constituency-level political networks: the BJP's local organisers maintain WhatsApp groups covering every polling booth in many constituencies, allowing rapid response to local events, distribution of candidate information, mobilisation of voters on polling day, and countering opposition messaging. This booth-level WhatsApp infrastructure complements the RSS's physical ground network, creating a hybrid digital-physical mobilisation system with no opposition equivalent.

3. Misinformation ecology: Indian WhatsApp misinformation operates through several vectors: party-produced content that simplifies or distorts opponent positions; volunteer-produced content that makes claims that central party machinery could plausibly deny; AI-generated deepfakes that fabricate statements by political leaders; communally framed content that activates prejudice without making factual claims; and recycled old images or videos presented as current events. The cross-linguistic spread — with the same misinformation translated and adapted into 15+ Indian languages — makes centralized fact-checking structurally impossible.

4. State-sponsored digital communication: The government's social media accounts, the MyGov platform, and the government's digital welfare notification system create communication channels that blur the line between public information and political advertising. The pre-election government WhatsApp campaign in 2024 — eventually stopped by the ECI — illustrated that government infrastructure can function as campaign infrastructure in ways that private parties cannot match.

5. Opposition digital disadvantage: The INDIA alliance parties individually have significant social media presence — Rahul Gandhi's personal social media following, AAP's early innovation in digital political communication, TMC's Bengal-specific digital networks — but none has a unified, cross-platform, multi-language content production system comparable to BJP's IT Cell. This creates a structural asymmetry in digital political communication that reinforces BJP's organisational advantage.

What People Often Misunderstand

• Social media is not the only or even primary factor in BJP's electoral success: The RSS ground network, welfare delivery, candidate selection, and political organisation are the primary drivers of BJP's electoral performance; social media amplifies these but does not substitute for them.
• WhatsApp misinformation affects all communities: Both pro-BJP and anti-BJP misinformation circulates on WhatsApp; the BJP's advantage is in systematic content production and distribution infrastructure, not in the exclusive use of the platform.
• Platform companies have limited tools for encrypted-platform misinformation: WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption means Meta cannot read message content; its tools for controlling misinformation are limited to message forwarding restrictions (implemented in 2019), fact-checker labels on public posts, and content restrictions on specific flagged content — none of which effectively addresses the private group problem.
• Digital media does not reach all voters equally: India's 750 million internet users leave approximately 650 million without internet access; among older, rural, and lower-income voters, television and physical campaign contact remain more important than social media; the digital ecosystem favours urban, younger, and more educated voter segments where WhatsApp penetration is highest.
• The BJP was not the pioneer of digital politics — AAP was: The Aam Aadmi Party's 2013 Delhi election — which shocked Indian politics by propelling a new party to near-majority — was the first major demonstration of social media as an Indian political tool; BJP subsequently adapted and dramatically scaled what AAP had pioneered.

What Changes Over Time

The AI deepfake problem has escalated sharply since 2023 — state elections in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Telangana (2023) saw documented deepfakes; the 2024 Lok Sabha election saw their widespread use. India does not have specific deepfake political content legislation; the Digital Personal Data Protection Act (2023) addresses data privacy but not political synthetic media. The ECI's fact-checking initiatives — directing platforms to label or remove specific content — have been ad hoc rather than systematic. 

The proposed AI governance framework under development as of May 2026 may eventually address political deepfakes, but regulatory frameworks typically lag technological deployment by years.

Sources and Further Reading

• East Asia Forum — Are social media, AI and misinformation undermining Indian democracy: https://eastasiaforum.org/2024/05/17/are-social-media-ai-and-misinformation-undermining-indian-democracy/
• OII Oxford — The 2024 Indian Elections: Strategic Use of Social Media: https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/news-events/the-2024-indian-elections-the-strategic-use-of-journalism-social-media-and-internet-governance-in-a-modi-centric-election/
• TechPolicy.Press — Dispatches on Tech and Democracy: India's 2024 Elections: https://www.techpolicy.press/dispatches-on-tech-and-democracy-indias-2024-elections-6/
• Al Jazeera Media Institute — Elections and Misinformation India: https://institute.aljazeera.net/en/ajr/article/2645
• Sage Journals — Retroactive Gatekeepers: Fact-Checkers, Electoral Disinformation in India: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/27523543251395190

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