New Delhi: Before the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, an organisation called NEWJ – short for New Emerging World of Journalism Limited – paid for a series of ads on Facebook that promoted Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and lampooned the opposition.NEWJ, a media investigation by the Reporters’ Collective has found, is a subsidiary of Jio Platforms Ltd – owned by none other than Reliance Group’s Mukesh Ambani.Reporters’ Collective and ad.watch studied all 536,070 political advertisements placed on Facebook and Instagram between February 2019 and November 2020.While NEWJ positions itself as producing news content, the advertisements that Ambani’s company promoted could fall under the “surrogate advertisements” category – they are not funded directly by a political party, even while furthering a political agenda.On Facebook, this kind of surreptious political advertising is not a new phenomenon. In 2019, an analysis by AltNews found high proportion of advertisements were run by pro-BJP pages. These Facebook pages did not declare a direct link with the saffron political party, but ran ads in favour of it nevertheless, raising questions about why unknown individuals would spend lakhs of rupees to help promote the ruling party.In the past, Facebook has tried to clamp down on such advertisements to promote transparency, but appears to have taken an uneven approach according to the Reporters’ Collective. “Only one page and 14 accounts that promoted the BJP were removed. Those were owned and operated by an IT firm called Silver Touch which had not formally declared its link with the BJP.”News articles or?The Facebook ads promoted by NEWJ were poised to look like news articles, according to the report.For example, one of them falsely claimed that Pragya Thakur, the terror-accused Hindu supremacist leader who was contesting the elections from Bhopal, had been exonerated of all charges in the Malegaon blast case. In fact, she is still under trial – and out on medical bail. Another advertisement featured a video of Rahul Gandhi cut in such a way that made it seem like he was paying respects to Pakistani Jaish-e-Mohammad leader Masood Azhar, when the full speech makes it clear that his point was quite the opposite. Another leader quoted out of context in NEWJ’s paid posts was Mehbooba Mufti.NEWJ claims to be a news publisher, aimed at people in small towns and villages, operating on social media. However, according to the Aljazeera reports, what it really does is rather different: “In reality, the company buys advertisement space on Facebook and Instagram to publish videos many of which are actually political promotions but are dressed as news stories. The advertisements have one underlying theme – to promote the BJP, including by fuelling misinformation, inciting anti-Muslim sentiments and denigrating opposition parties.” The page published about 170 such ads before the 2019 elections.The founder of NEWJ, Shalabh Upadhyay, has close ties with both the BJP and Reliance, according to the Reporters’ Collective. “His father Umesh Upadhyay is president and media director at Reliance Industries Ltd and previously worked as president of news at Reliance-owned Network-18 group that runs a host of news channels in India. His uncle Satish Upadhyay is a BJP leader and former president of the party’s Delhi unit.”Surrogate advertisements are illegal in India, but that ban does not extend to digital platforms like Facebook, though the Election Commission has been aware of this loophole.Meta, the company running Facebook, responded to Reporters’ Collective by denying allegations that it had not been uniform in taking down political advertisements. “We apply our policies uniformly without regard to anyone’s political positions or party affiliations. The decisions around integrity work or content escalations cannot and are not made unilaterally by just one person; rather, they are inclusive of different views from around the company, a process that is critical to making sure we consider, understand and account for both local and global contexts.”NEWJ, Reporters Collective found, did not limit its activities to the Lok Sabha elections. The organisation ran pro-BJP ads on Facebook and Instagram “over a period of 22 months and 10 elections, that collectively were viewed more than 290 million times by Facebook users”. The total costs of these advertisements, borne by NEWJ, was Rs 5.2 million.The company was founded in January 2018 by Shalabh Upadhyay and his sister Deeksha, with a paid-up capital of 100,000, according to Aljazeera. In mid-November that year, Reliance Industrial Investment and Holdings Limited took over the company with a 75% equity stake. Over the next two years, Reliance pumped money into NEWJ even as it made net losses.NEWJ responseUpadhyay told Reporters’ Collective that his organisation was focused on “transparent and impactful independent journalism”: “As one of the largest social-first news publishers, NEWJ is dedicated to delivering transparent and impactful independent journalism … To this end, we strictly abide by Meta’s community guidelines and advertising policies while following the recommended authorisation processes to ensure integrity, transparency and quality of our reportage,” he said.He did not, according to Reporters’ Collective, respond to specific queries on the kinds of posts and misinformation NEWJ was promoting.