It has been a pretty hectic month for Vijeta Dahiya. The YouTube content researcher has been analysing political themes for infotainment creator Dhruv Rathee, working late nights to help him produce videos on topics concerning Election 2024.
“Yesterday, I managed to rest a bit after working 34 hours on a fourpart election series, with very little sleep in between,” says Dahiya. The long hours are worth it, he says. “I think these videos are creating a massive on-ground impact. They bring up ideas like democracy and accountability of elected leaders.”
Dahiya can see people’s enthusiasm reflected in the sudden surge in subscribers over the past month, along with better likes-to-views ratio and a higher number of comments on videos even when the content is critical and not celebratory.
According to data from analytics firm Social Blade, Rathee gained 2.5 million subscribers on YouTube in April alone. He has 19.4 million subscribers overall, accumulated over a decade-long journey. Similarly, since January, television journaliststurned-digital news influencers such as Ravish Kumar and Abhisar Sharma, who are known for creating political content on YouTube, have seen a significant bump in monthly views on their channels—a rise of 175% and 115%, respectively, according to data from Social Blade. This is, in many ways, the YouTube election. Dahiya, a writer-filmmaker from Haryana, sees this as a break from the 2019 election for which WhatsApp was the primary channel of digital campaigning. “That period was marked by a flood of fake news and it continues to flourish, making it harder to trace who is receiving what kind of messaging,” he says.
ET BureauThe “WhatsApp Forward Era”, he says, may have inadvertently paved the way for the YouTube wave in this election. “WhatsApp remains critical for propaganda factories that prefer to work in stealth mode, but someone has to openly call out their misinformation and disinformation,” he says. This is where YouTube steps in. It has over 500 million active users in India, nearly equalling the reach of the Meta-owned WhatsApp in the country.
Besides critics and dissenters of the government, political parties, too, have actively built a presence on YouTube in the past year, says Talha Rashid, political strategist and cofounder of Discourse Consulting. Many party leaders have launched YouTube channels to share live streams, rally videos, interviews and more, alongside collaborating with digital influencers for podcasts.
A Rest of World report from February noted a two-to-four-fold increase in YouTube subscribers of several political leaders like Raghav Chadha (AAP), Shivraj Singh Chouhan (BJP) and Revanth Reddy (INC) in the second half of 2023. At the time of going to press, AAP had 6.26 million subscribers on its YouTube channel, 360,000 more than the ruling BJP’s 5.9 million. Congress trailed behind the two on YouTube with 4.77 million subscribers. Representatives of these political parties did not respond to ET’s request for a comment.
In 2019, parties mainly utilised WhatsApp for targeted digital messaging, with one major party reportedly creating over 200,000 WhatsApp groups for this purpose, says Rashid. This time around, the focus has shifted to producing videos to shape the narrative. Instead of crafting visual and textual messages exclusively for WhatsApp forwards, there’s a trend of circulating 30-second clips from YouTube videos via the platform.
Rashid says each general election cycle over the last decade has had a different dominant platform for political engagement. “In 2014, Facebook emerged as a central hub for political activities, with parties utilising pages and events for rallies. Facebook even issued alerts on polling day,” he recalls.
Tube of the times
The transition from Facebook to WhatsApp and now YouTube indicates how shifts in people’s internet habits often shape the role of social media in electoral processes. The rise of YouTube as a dominant platform for building election narratives and critiquing can be attributed to the TikTokification of content consumption and the emergence of video-editing apps for smartphones, says Meghnad S, a YouTuber who focuses on politics, society and the internet on his channel, Meghnerd. A general dissatisfaction with the coverage of important civic issues in prime-time TV news may have also contributed to a surge in news consumption on YouTube, he adds.
Further, the deluge of WhatsApp forwards, along with the platform’s campaigns and efforts to combat fake news, might have contributed to the decline in the popularity of “ Whats App University ” . “Anecdotally, I’ve observed increased scepticism towards WhatsApp forwards, particularly in urban areas. There have been instances where members of political party-created WhatsApp groups have called out misinformation being propagated within those groups,” says Meghnad. WhatsApp offers some data to support this. Since 2019, it has set a limit on forwarding messages and channel updates to just five chats at once. In an email, WhatsApp told ET: “The limits imposed on ‘forwards’ have reduced the spread of ‘highly forwarded messages’ on WhatsApp by over 70%.” In 2022, the app added new limits for forwarding messages to groups, where messages that have the “forwarded label” can only be forwarded to one group at a time, rather than five.
The improvement in internet speeds and the low cost of mobile data have made video browsing on YouTube and elsewhere seamless and more affordable. According to a survey by cable.co.uk covering 200 countries, the average global cost of 1 GB of mobile data has plunged by 68% from $8.8 to $2, between 2019 and 2023. India ranks 7th on the list of countries with the most affordable mobile data plans, with Israel, Italy and Fiji topping it.
Shahana Sheikh, a PhD candidate at Yale University who is studying election campaigns, says that some of her findings from 2022 foreshadowed the current YouTube trends. “About one and a half years ago, I surveyed over 400 party functionaries from various levels in BJP and SP in Uttar Pradesh. Less than a quarter reported using YouTube for party purposes, including campaigning,” she says. In contrast, among the nearly 2,000 voters who used smartphones, surveyed in the same context, the share of daily YouTube users matched that of daily WhatsApp users. She found this to be the case for both male and female smartphone users. “Political parties seem to have understood the power of YouTube as a platform to reach voters using video content,” adds Sheikh.
Where’s the money going?
The transition is also impacting party expenditures on political advertising. Between February 5 and May 4, 2024, both BJP and Congress allocated more funds for Google Ads for videos alone, than they did for Meta Ads across ad formats. BJP spent `50.4 crore on Google Ads for video content, more than three times what it spent on Meta Ads across all formats —`15.4 crore. Similarly, Congress spent `24.5 crore on Google Ads for video content and `8.1 crore on Meta Ads across various formats during the same period. These expenditure details were obtained from Google’s Ads Transparency Center and Meta’s Ad Library Report.
While WhatsApp has been busy constraining the virality of forwarded messages, YouTube has been proactively moving in the direction of becoming the go-to digital platform for election news and information. A March post on the Google India blog says, “For news and information related to the 2024 election, YouTube highlights high-quality content from authoritative news sources during key moments, through its ‘Top News’ and ‘Breaking News’ shelves, and news watch page.” Google has also collaborated with the Election Commission of India (ECI) to enable easy discovery of critical voting information. “YouTube shows a variety of election information panels, including on how to register to vote, how to vote and candidate information,” says the blog.
Challenges on Youtube
While YouTube solves the traceability issue in terms of checking misinformation, it has its challenges, says Rohini Lakshané, technologist and interdisciplinary researcher. “On YouTube, a lot of promotional videos of political parties involve influencers who do not disclose paid partnerships. Many of them are in local languages, using cultural references that make it harder for the platform to detect misinformation,” she says.
According to YouTube, violative content made up 0.11-0.12% of views on its platform in Q4 2023. However, Lakshané quotes a recent study from Tech Global Institute that found that 85% of political content uploaded by Indian influencers across different platforms did not disclose it as sponsored content. Further, being an open platform isn’t always an advantage. “The government, a major regulatory body for these platforms, could potentially request the closure of critical channels,” says Srinivas Kodali, an independent researcher from Hyderabad studying digitisation in India. “An open platform is thus susceptible to easy control,” he adds. Additionally, he questions whether people can access quality content on YouTube when most platforms serve as echo chambers.
Kodali says that if the Data Protection Act is implemented before the next election, platforms may face increased pressure to combat hate speech, potentially driving most election-related content underground. While he anticipates AI and deepfakes to dominate the digital battleground in the next polling season, the impact of regulations on social media’s role in the electoral process remains uncertain.
