The PR Politics: How is social media leveraged for political propoganda in India?

Over the few weeks, India witnessed one of the largest student led movements in my recent memory. Triggered by the allegations surrounding NEET, thousands took it to streets for accountability, transparency & justice while millions more joined from behind the screen on social medias.

What began as a scattered post from students, activists and meme pages evolved into a nation wide protest, led by Cockroach Janata Party & Abhijith Deepke. Credits to the young man for taking effort to come from United States to talk for future of this nation. Let’s also not forget Sonam Sir’s hunger strike which made this movement much stronger.

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But as protest grew stronger, something else caught my attention. Political Parties, IT Cells, Affiliated Influncers and pages rose their heads - some to support and some to resist.

And I knew:
The protest is no longer a protest;
It’s become a battle for narratives.

Soon, feeds flooded with accusations of international fundings, connection with terror groups and enemy lines of the country. Most accounts shared the cheap propoganda even before fact check could arrive. Made me remember the famous quote:

“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”

On further digging, I came across a screenshot of an email from “atozconsultancymumbai@gmail.com” offering ₹15,000 per video. Their demand was 4 videos on a span of 1 week, each video being around 2 mins praising the government’s acheivements in education. (attached the screenshot of the mail below)

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](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!wu_M!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc4e55977-da0c-4cb1-849e-346d1d8982fb_1080x1481.jpeg)

I cannot independently verify the authencity if this email. However, what makes it noteworthy is that several content creators on Meta platforms publicly claimed on recieving similar offers during the same period. These can been seen as an attempt to hijack online discourse around the protest through paid creator campaigns.

Today, every major public movement is fought twice - once on the streets and then on the feed! (How Bizzare!)

Political parties have every right to communicate with the public but trying to drown out a genuine public outrage by coordinated messaging, paid promotions and unverified propoganda is a question to ethics.

As journalists, creators, and citizens, our responsibility is not to become another cog in a political PR machine. Because the greatest victory for any propaganda campaign is not convincing you of a lie.
It is making you forget what the movement was about in the first place.

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