Straight Talk | The Outrage Economy: How Meta’s Algorithms Manipulate Young India

Sanbeer Singh Ranhotra

Meta’s admission that money can boost content raises a bigger question: who decides what young Indians see online—and what happens to protests the algorithm ignores?

Let’s start with the admission, because it changes everything.

Last week, Meta’s Global Affairs Chief Joel Kaplan and the American social media giant’s representatives sat across from senior IT Ministry officials and acknowledged that “a lot of money was paid to boost certain types of content" on Facebook and Instagram in India. Mark Zuckerberg apologised separately, for briefly restricting Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s video addressing Gen Z on the NEET-UG crisis, pulled from Facebook on July 28 for approximately five to six hours before being restored. The same week, Meta conceded that illegal content, including child sexual abuse material, had been promoted on its platforms following a BBC World Service investigation in July revealing that Instagram’s ad review systems had cleared paid advertisements directing users to Telegram channels selling CSAM.

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Pick whichever admission disturbs you most. But the one that should stay with you is the quietly buried one: money was paid to boost certain content to a “specific audience". Not to run ads in the conventional sense. Certain content, selected and amplified, paid for by someone, pushed to someone. If you still thought Meta was a neutral pipe through which users expressed themselves freely, that sentence closes the debate. Visibility on Meta is purchased. And whoever is purchasing it is deciding what India’s 400-odd million social........

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