Emails sent to ids mentioned for ’Aghadi Bighadi’ (front in trouble) also remained unanswered

Interestingly, the Facebook pages of ‘Distoy Farak Shivshahi Parat’ and ‘Aghadi Bighadi’ have been in existence only for a few months — the former since July 2 and the latter since May 22. Both pages have become inactive after the election results were announced.

The amounts spent by these entities might seem small compared to the election advertisement budgets of most parties, but the impact in the online space was exponential. Distoy Farak Shivshahi Parat with 4,68,948 followers was able to generate a whopping 4.76 million interactions via 1,518 ads, resulting in an interaction rate of 4.25%. Aghadi Bighadi with 3,23,338 followers notched up 3.25 million interactions from 928 ads yielding an interaction rate of 5.82%.

Interaction rate is the percentage of people that saw the advertisement and chose to click, like, share, or comment on it. How were these pages able to rack up such high engagement on their content?‘Aghadi Bighadi’ specialises in what are essentially ‘attack ads’, with the NCP, MNS and Congress leadership bearing the brunt. Caricatures, modified video clips, morphed images, memes and pointed language were deployed in the 928 ads that were run by the page.

‘Distoy Farak Shivshahi Parat’ is focused on promoting Devendra Fadnavis and Narendra Modi. While ‘Aghadi Bighadi’ seemed to have a local focus in its targeting, ‘Distoy Farak Shivshahi Parat’’s targets included Jawaharlal Nehru and Kanhaiya Kumar. It is unclear whether these political advertisements had been pre-certified by the Media Certification and Monitoring Committees of the ECI as agreed to under the ‘voluntary code of ethics’.

So is the question of who were the advertisers in these cases?