ShareChat experiments with political ads | Economic Times

New Delhi: Homegrown social media firm ShareChat is experimenting with political ads on the platform as part of its monetisation strategy and to help political parties engage with their constituents.Tamil Nadu’s rival Dravidian parties, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), have been the first to run campaigns on the platform, which allows conversations in local languages. ShareChat is currently running a pilot campaign with the AIADMK in Tamil Nadu for the upcoming state assembly elections on April 6. Palanivel Thiagarajan, the DMK’s sitting member of legislative assembly (MLA) from Madurai Central who is re-contesting from the same seat, has also used the platform for specific campaigns.The social media platform, which has close to 160 million monthly active users and is available in 15 local languages including Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali and Assamese, will look to replicate the model to national parties in future.“As part of its focus on ad-based revenue monetisation model, ShareChat is experimenting with political advertising,” a source familiar with the development said, adding it has already launched an ad transparency portal and is also part of the Election Commission of India’s voluntary code of ethics.“With ShareChat being dominant in all the four states with Indic language focus, it expects to garner immense interest among political parties to design their language-led election campaigns for reaching out to possible voters,” the person added.ShareChat confirmed the development but declined to provide further comment.The campaigns as well as the spends by the AIADMK and Thiagarajan can be accessed on the transparency portal.“Sharechat is a globally local social media platform. It is not just ShareChat, we also engage with our constituents on all social media platforms. ShareChat is popular among rural masses,” said Aspire K Swaminathan, Secretary, IT wing of AIADMK.“Whether it is Facebook, Instagram or ShareChat, we engage with our target audience and build conversations around an issue,” Swaminathan added. US-based social media giants Facebook and Twitter have also talked about their ongoing efforts in the area of political campaigning and the tools that they have put in place to combat fake news and misinformation ahead of elections in Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Assam, Kerala and Puducherry.For instance, Twitter said it has built public service announcements (PSAs) for the assembly elections and created moments in regional languages such as Bangla, Tamil besides Hindi and English.It has also created “pre-bunks” on subjects such as indelible ink and electronic voting machines (EVMs) in multiple languages to inoculate people against misinformation. It has also set guidelines to help curators understand what constitutes misleading content.Similarly, Facebook said that it is taking steps to enhance civic engagement, combat hate speech, limit misinformation and remove voter suppression.In a newsroom post, the company said it will significantly reduce the distribution of content that its proactive detection technology identifies as likely hate speech or violence and incitement, in order to decrease the risk of problematic content going viral in these states and potentially inciting violence ahead of or during the elections.