Chinese app Helo posts around 11,000 political ads worth Rs 7.7 cr on Facebook, all have been taken down now

Update: The story has been updated with a detailed response from Helo App

Election season is upon us and we are already seeing a lot of unauthorised political advertisements making the rounds of social media. Facebook, one of the largest digital ad platforms among social media sites, has reportedly taken down 11,000 ads worth Rs 7.7 crore posted by Chinese app Helo — an app owned by Bytedance, the same company that owns TikTok.

According to a report in The Print, the ads were taken down as they did not adhere to Facebook’s ad transparency rules. The advertisements under question had content involving political figures and nationally relevant issues complete with cover images of politicians, etc. But there was no disclaimer as to who paid for these ads. Some of the ads involved openly insulting political figures.

As per data available on Facebook Ad Library, in addition to these 11,000 ads now, Facebook had also taken down 49 ads by Vigo Video (an app owned by Bytedance too) and seven ads posted on ShareChat.

Helo has refused to divulge any details on the matter as it considers its ad-spending as confidential information. It did, however, claim in its email to the report that it had informed the Election Commission of India that it would not be serving any political advertisements on its platform during the election period.

While the Helo ads were not found to be promoting any single party, the ad content included news items about politicians, politics and national issues. Here are a few of the captions: “BJP using Atalji to the maximum potential”, “Result day tomorrow no doubt bjp return again mp election result” (sic), “Just a few days back Rahul Gandhi said we will abolish GST…” and so on. Some of the captions also involved random stringing of words with a cover image showing tasteless, photoshopped images.

According to its app description, Helo is a social app available in 14 Indian languages. It mainly focusses on connecting people across different regional languages and its content play includes “a wide collection of jokes, WhatsApp status, wishes, shayari and entertainment news,” in addition to trending and viral videos, file sharing, following creators and more. It is one among the many Chinese social media apps that have also been embroiled in controversies around fake news.

According to this Hindustan Times report , Helo Hindi once had a post claiming that BBC had declared Congress as the fourth most corrupt party in the world. Another news involves Rajasthan leader Sachin Pilot being quoted as saying that India should have helped Pakistan clear its debt.

While Helo has partnered with AltNews in December 2018, since it is a social app, there is still fake news and misinformation being available on the platform. The Print has enlisted a post from as recently as 27 March highlighting it.

When an app with such a reputation puts out politically-charged ads, where there is no clarity on who is financing these advertisements apart from the app entity, then that’s a problem area.  Facebook believes that holding the ads in a library for seven years is a key part of fighting interference. The library will resemble archives brought to the United States, Brazil and Britain last year. The Indian archive will contain contact information for some ad buyers or their official regulatory certificates. For individuals buying political ads, Facebook said it would ensure their listed name matches government-issued documents, according to a Reuters report.

“By authorising advertisers and bringing more transparency to ads, we can better defend against foreign interference in India’s elections,” Facebook said on its website in the context of political ads.

Facebook is being extra cautious when it comes to political advertising so as to ensure it is within the guidelines of the Model Code of Conduct. With a history of letting Russian entities buy ads promoting Trump to influence the election, Facebook has been under the scanner on the topic of external influence during elections.

Helo App’s response

According to a Helo spokesperson, of the 11,000 ads that were taken down only 770 (7 percent) were original pieces of content and the rest of the 93 percent were translations or multi-language variants of this original ad content.

_"_At Helo, we take concerns around political advertising very seriously. As with any other social media platform, we harness digital advertising with the sole purpose of driving user growth. Out of all the ads that have been generated from Helo since we launched in June 2018, ads citing political mentions amount to only 0.02 percent. These ads were all generated prior to the declaration of General Elections by the Election Commission of India (ECI) and the enforcement of the Model Code of Conduct . In line with abiding by Model Code of Conduct, we have informed the ECI (Election Commission of India) that we will not serve any paid political advertisements throughout this election period and will not be proactively onboarding any political figures or parties on our platform," said the spokesperson.