As India holds its elections, Google is monetizing one of the country’s biggest propaganda and disinformation outlets.
OpIndia is a Hindu nationalist media site with a reputation for publishing Islamophobic content and other disinformation supporting Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government.
Google’s own publisher policies prohibit the monetization of content that “incites hatred against, promotes discrimination of, or disparages an individual or group on the basis of their race or ethnic origin, religion,” and other criteria. Google also forbids monetizing content that “makes claims that are demonstrably false and could significantly undermine participation or trust in an electoral or democratic process.”
But that doesn’t stop Google from monetizing OpIndia. Take, for example, ads placed by Google alongside this racist AI-generated image of Muslims.
A racist, AI-generated image of Muslims on OpIndia's site is surrounded by ads served by Google.
India’s Muslims have faced discrimination for decades. They are increasingly the target of violence, and recent laws passed by the Modi government have further limited their rights, experts told the Council on Foreign Relations.
OpIndia’s tendency to prop up Modi is so overt that, in 2019, its own co-founder Rahul Raj tweeted he had “distanced himself” from the outlet, which he said had become a “blind mouthpiece” of Modi’s government.
“Their editorial guideline is to follow the establishment. That is it,” said technology consultant and digital expert Meesam Hyder, who volunteered with StopFundingHate in 2020 when the organization pressured advertisers to pull support from OpIndia’s website.
“There are some factual reports in the website as well. But mostly…they deceive, they make false accusations, they make false reports,” he told Check My Ads in an interview.
Those false reports often portray Muslims as a “societal threat,” according to Hyder. One major example of this took place in May 2020, when OpIndia published an article falsely alleging a 15-year-old boy had been killed in a “human sacrifice ritual” to make a local mosque more powerful. Police then clarified that the village didn’t even have a mosque, and filed a report against OpIndia. OpIndia also regularly publishes stories about “Love Jihad,” a conspiracy theory against Muslims that has caused at least one death.
Recent articles on the "Love Jihad" conspiracy theory on OpIndia's website.
Running ads on hate and propaganda and using them to fuel one another on the same site isn’t new — just look at Breitbart. And just like Breitbart, Google is helping to make all this possible by monetizing the site.
A quick search of OpIndia’s ads.txt file — which is where publishers list the companies who they sell ad space to or through — shows OpIndia claims a direct relationship with Google.
OpIndia's ads.txt, showing a relationship with Google.
When you cross-reference this with Google’s own sellers.json — which is where Google logs all the publishers or intermediaries it works with — Google confirms the publisher ID is legit.
Google's entry on well-known.dev, showing a relationship with OpIndia.
And a quick visit to OpIndia shows how Google takes unwitting advertisers’ money and runs their ads next to conspiracy theories. For example, an advertisement for the Palm Beach Post newspaper, owned by Cox Enterprises, was seen running next to an article about the “Love Jihad” conspiracy theory.
An ad for the Palm Beach Post appearing on a story promoting a conspiracy theory.
While Google keeps forgetting its own rules, other adtech companies figured out how bad OpIndia’s content was almost four year ago.
Following an email from Check My Ads’ Nandini Jammi, prominent ad exchange Rubicon found OpIndia “violates (their) policies” and they said they removed it from their inventory.
GumGum, another major adtech firm, also confirmed they have “no association with OpIndia” in an email sent to Hyder in 2020.
Brands have also noticed OpIndia’s problematic content. During a 2020 campaign from the non-profit StopFundingHate, Digital Ocean, Octopus Energy, Squarespace, CarMax and many more companies pulled their ads from OpIndia.
Google’s decision to swim against the current and monetize the site comes at an incredibly sensitive time for the world’s largest democracy.
India is one of 64 countries around the world holding a national election in 2024. Its voting kicked off on April 19, will feature seven separate phases, and have the full results announced June 4.
"The violence against journalists, the politically partisan media and the concentration of media ownership all demonstrate that press freedom is in crisis in the world's largest democracy, ruled since 2014 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the embodiment of the Hindu nationalist right," the report said.
In response to RSF’s ranking, OpIndia went on the attack, calling the widely respected ranking "a biased index tailor-made to peddle the global left's narrative, and is naive at best, and malicious at worst.”
The report likely hit close to home for an outlet like OpIndia.
“They are disseminating misinformation for the vulnerable masses, and people get misled by that,” Hyder said.
So why is it monetizing OpIndia? Google isn't just violating its own policies: It’s also helping a website monetize its harmful misinformation at a perilous time for India’s democracy, and bringing brands along for the ride.
