This year’s election is being waged most vigorously on voters’ phones
there? It’s me, your sweetheart,” a push notification coos at 7am. It comes from one of India’s most popular smartphone apps, Helo, which allows users to chat and share content. But the flirtatious burble soon gives way to political anecdotes and jokes aimed at national leaders. Many question whether Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the opposition Congress party, is really Hindu, or make him look weak.
The campaign still features billboards and little lorries with loudspeakers plying through towns and villages. But this year’s election is being waged most vigorously on voters’ phones. At the previous general election, in 2014, India’s 1.3bn citizens had barely 100m smartphones between them. Now they have more than 400m. Mobile data are cheap, with a gigabyte costing just $0.26. India has become the biggest market for Facebook , WhatsApp and a host of other social-media apps.
The app remains political parties’ favoured means of disseminating propaganda, factual and otherwise. The Bharatiya Janata Party recruited a “troll army” of volunteers in time for the last election, which it won in a landslide. In the five years since, its social-media soldiers have made life online miserable for its ideological enemies, mainly liberals, leftists, Muslims and feminists.
At 8.40am, Helo bleeps again, unbidden. It wants to share the good news that “America has dealt a tight slap to India’s pimp-journalists!” The pimps in question are news outlets that had reported that India had not downed a Pakistani-16 last month, as the government had claimed. The accompanying post states—wrongly—that the American government has denied the reports. It comes from an outfit called Special Coverage News, which seems to specialise in machine-generated copy with a pro-Modi tilt.
There is no obvious way to prevent such claims from circulating. Indeed, the chief executive of a rival app to Helo acknowledges there is no law to prevent his company going further, and taking fees for surreptitious advertising or selling data about users’ locations. The Election Commission has been meeting social-media firms to try to find ways to ensure that they delete content that violates its code of conduct. But many of the apps concerned, such as WhatsApp, are impossible to police.
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