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With the season of Lok Sabha elections gaining momentum, political parties are going all out in their quest to persuade every possible voter. Online promotions are extensively used to shape public opinion across these platforms. Social media platforms are trying their best prevent misuse and keep the spurt of partisan content in check by keeping ad transparency tools which would keep the political candidate's expenditures online. Facebook's ad transparency tool will allow you to read the Ad Library Report, Google’s offering, on the other hand, sorts its data by advertisers or candidates. WhatsApp has a feature called 'Checkpoint tipline' which allows users to check the authenticity of information received by them.

A recent survey by Social Media Matters and Institute for Governance, Policies, and Politics has revealed that more than 53% of the population has received fake news over various social media platforms, owing to the air of general elections. Facebook and WhatsApp have been excessively used to misinform the users. To counter fake news and misinformation, Facebook, Google, WhatsApp, and Twitter have recently announced a slew of new tools and policies for bringing more transparency. This is also done to scan political promotion done on their platform often by users.

Every one in two Indians have received fake news in the past 30 days, a study has claimed. Although Facebook and WhatsApp have been fighting against fake news and misinformation, by inducing transparency in political ads, getting a set of fact-checkers, and commissioning tools to weed out false information, the circulation of misinformation is still rampant. WhatsApp said it had made significant product changes and collaborated with partners across civil society to address the consequences of misinformation.

Facebook has announced a major change in its algorithm by introducing a metric called Click-gap. This will allow users to see "low-quality" content in their news feed. Facebook will also incorporate a new "collaborative process" into its news feed which will allow the platform to consult journalists, fact-checking experts, academics, civil-society organisations to build a feature groups of Facebook users can refer to journalistic sources to check claims made in a potentially false content. The company is planning to reduce a group's "overall news feed distribution", or penalise them with limited visibility, if a group's shared content has been said false by independent fact-checkers. It will also allow Facebook members, who are no longer a part of a group, to remove their posts and comments even after they have left the group.

Facebook has invested in artificial intelligence for moderation of a large number of accounts since it becomes difficult for the company to moderate each and every account. In a blog post, Facebook's vice-president Ajit Mohan revealed that Facebook wishes to fight election interfaces ahead of general elections in India. The program is already in action, with around one million accounts being removed everyday which are found to violate the company's rule against misinformation, voter suppression and hate speech. Facebook has also set-up fact-checking and election-type war-rooms to ensure that the spread of misinformation is curbed to greater degrees.

Every one in two Indians have received fake news in the past 30 days, a study has claimed. Although Facebook and WhatsApp have been fighting against fake news and misinformation, by inducing transparency in political ads, getting a set of fact-checkers, and commissioning tools to weed out false information, the circulation of misinformation is still rampant. WhatsApp said it had made significant product changes and collaborated with partners across civil society to address the consequences of misinformation.

A Facebook user from Delhi has claimed that a Facebook representative has knocked on his door to verify if he had written any post with political content. He claimed that the man had carried a company identity with him and asked for his Aadhaar card to verify his credentials for writing a social media post with political content. Facebook has never resorted to such measures of personal verification anywhere during elections. Facebook denied the allegation.

Facebook has banned on white extremist content owing to international pressure. Under these rules, users cannot post anything which draws attention towards the idea of white extremism, not even something in a celebratory sense. A lot of people objected to the ban arguing that Facebook was neutral platform and it went against the idea of freedom of expression. The ban went into effect in the US.

Facebook's ad transparency measures around the funding of political campaigns have faced a setback in curbing activities of the alleged "personal election unit" of Amit Shah called The Association Of Billion Minds (ABM). ABM has been the secretive organisation of the BJP which has reportedly been managing ad campaigns of the party on social media platforms. The ABM has spawned widespread on-the-ground and digital operations for the BJP. ABM has been managing eight popular Facebook pages which have been allegedly garnering huge amounts of money for online ads for the BJP. These include pages like Bharat ke Mann Ki Baat and Nation With Namo. The transparency initiative of Facebook requires online ads to mention disclaimer with contact information of the person who paid for the ads. However, none of these eight Facebook pages mention anything about ABM.

Facebook has deleted major accounts linked with both India and Pakistan which were engaged in "co-ordinated inauthentic behaviour and spam." A lot of such pages were operated by corporates, political organizations, and government agencies. Most of these pages had as many as one million followers, and users managing these pages bought Facebook ads to boost traffics. Pages linked to the Instagram account were also deleted by Facebook. However, not all of these pages were run by BJP or Congress. Most of them were run by citizens who were either an ally to a particular party or directly employed by them because of which many politicians are asking for increased regulation over such pages to prevent their usage.