Elections in India's Gujarat have become a WhatsApp spam war, as the main political parties push content across thousands of groups to influence voters
10,000 volunteers, 50,000 WhatsApp groups, and the intense fight to “control people's feed” in Gujarat. — • AHMEDABAD, GUJARAT, INDIA Tweets: @restofworld , @samriddhi0809 , @samriddhi0809 , @samriddhi0809 , @nationalfedera4 , @samriddhi0809 , @hrishirajanand_ , @samriddhi0809 , @ankitlal , @restofworld , @samriddhi0809 , @cheguwera , @samriddhi0809 , and @clifroz Tweets: @restofworld : TV ads are a thing of the past. Elections in Modi's home state are now a WhatsApp spam war New from @Samriddhi0809 https://restofworld.org/... @samriddhi0809 : Process of disseminating messages is systematized: Head of the party's social media team finalizes topic; Content circulated to zone-level leaders, who forward to assigned volunteers, they share it with voters via WhatsApp. BJP also send GIFs about their policies. ++ https://twitter.com/... @samriddhi0809 : WhatsApp Spam War ahead of #GujaratElections2022 With 50,000 WhatsApp groups, 10k volunteers behind the screen and tons on msges, Political parties have started to communicate with public of #Gujarat through WhatsApp and influence their choices. Stay++ https://restofworld.org/... @samriddhi0809 : Congress is targeting individual communities in its messages, Shah said. That means creating groups and messages for people belonging to the Thakur community, another one for Muslims and other groups belonging to different communities. “We control people's feed,” @nationalfedera4 : important thread on the changing dynamics of canvassing during elections. social media apps have been a 24X7 propaganda machine. #GujaratElections2022 https://twitter.com/... @samriddhi0809 : Pankaj Shukla, state coordinator for BJP IT cell decides the topic which gets circulated across more than 50k group. “Even before the age of social media, the party used to send mass emails and SMS to woo the voters.” “We aim to target all age groups”, https://restofworld.org/... Hrishi Raj Anand / @hrishirajanand_ : #GujaratElection2022 Inside the WAR ROOMS of the three way contest IT Cells: The backend that uses WhatsApp to its maximum potential. Why WhatsApp is so important across political parties? Is there a privacy breach here? All ques answered in this imp Story by @Samriddhi0809 https://twitter.com/... @samriddhi0809 : Entire process of content has to be carried in a timely manner: First round of content at 9 am, next at noon 3, followed by 6pm and concluding at 9pm. Beyond groups, these campaigners also use WhatsApp's broadcast feature to reach a wider audience. https://restofworld.org/... @ankitlal : WhatsApp is an indispensable tool in any election campaign today. However, neither the platform nor the regulators are equipped to handle what's going on. WhatsApp is THE most important tool in any political campaign as of date. https://twitter.com/... @restofworld : In Modi's home state of Gujarat, each of the main political parties runs thousands of WhatsApp groups where they push out content daily. As Indian politicians embrace the app as a campaign tool, experts fear misinformation and a breach of voter privacy https://restofworld.org/... @samriddhi0809 : Social media teams for Congress and AAP also described using WhatsApp to indirectly influence voters. Volunteers often create random WhatsApp groups without mentioning their party's name and try to steer the conversation in their favor. https://twitter.com/... @cheguwera : Is there any solution for this? @WhatsApp @Meta @elonmusk https://restofworld.org/... @samriddhi0809 : @aiyannaishaana believes that people getting added without their consent to these groups is a privacy breach. “These groups are not joined voluntarily by many. There is no telling how those with access to these numbers can then use them in the future, e.g., spam calls, profiling” Clifton D' Rozario / @clifroz : “Currently, in Gujarat, over 10,000 BJP IT Cell volunteers and 50,000 “registered digital warriors” are involved in the creation and circulation of more than 50 new posts each day, targeting over 5 million voters through all social media platforms, including WhatsApp.” https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The playbook on display in Gujarat is three years in the making: back in 2019, researchers already flagged armies of party volunteers pushing misinformation through WhatsApp group chats, and by mid-2019 parties were running cheap bulk-messaging software to evade the app's five-forward limit. What the Gujarat campaign adds is industrial scale and structure — the BJP alone fields 10,000 volunteers across 50,000 groups, while Congress and AAP segment their own groups by voter community.
First-order effects
- Voters in Gujarat are being added to WhatsApp groups without consent, putting phone numbers into party hands for targeting and potential profiling — a privacy exposure that sits outside any formal campaign-finance or ad-disclosure regime.
- The BJP IT Cell's output of over 50 new posts daily aimed at more than 5 million voters makes WhatsApp, not TV, the primary battleground in Modi's home state, forcing Congress and AAP to match its community-specific group strategy just to stay in voters' feeds.
Second-order effects
- Meta faces mounting pressure to police political spam inside private, encrypted groups where it has no visibility — the same structural blind spot later detailed when BJP staffers described crafting posts for a vast WhatsApp network built to exploit majority fears.
- Because campaigning happens free from public scrutiny, as later coverage of the BJP's national operations showed (the 2024 election WhatsApp machine), rivals' spending shifts from broadcast ads toward volunteer labor and group-management tooling, repricing an election around human bandwidth rather than media budgets.
Third-order effects
- If every major party runs permanent 'digital warrior' networks between elections, India's information environment structurally shifts toward unaccountable, closed-channel persuasion — leaving WhatsApp/Meta ill-equipped and regulators unprepared, exactly as observers warn.
- Consent-free group additions point toward a regulatory collision over phone-number-based political profiling, the kind of distribution-layer liability question platforms have so far avoided by treating group chats as private space.
The trend: Indian elections are migrating from broadcast advertising to coordinated, closed-group messaging at volunteer-army scale, outpacing both platform moderation and electoral regulation.