Govt employing influencers: Death knell for professional news media?

The development will likely hasten the decline of the legacy media while providing a viable revenue model to hitherto economically unstable social media news and entertainment purveyors

With an eye on the general elections, the government's communication policy has diversified from TV and print media to include social media influencers. Individuals with large followings on social media will get government funding to promote the government's leadership and programmes either directly or through advertisements.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) issued an open tender on March 3 for empanelling social media marketing agencies under its project MyGov. The agencies selected are expected to provide a detailed plan of campaigns to promote the government's programmes and policies by finding the "right mix of influencers". They will be tasked with content creation, media planning, execution and reporting on the campaign's effectiveness. Union commerce minister Piyush Goyal also met with 50 social media influencers on June 23 to discuss how they could promote the benefits of millets, popularise handicrafts and create consumer awareness. Other ministers are bound to follow.

The Modi government is not alone. During his Bharat Jodo Yatra, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi used a social media influencer, "Curly Tales", a food and travel show on YouTube, to present softer facets of his personality. The Ashok Gehlot-led Congress government in Rajasthan has also announced a policy of issuing advertisements to social media influencers apart from print and TV media "to make public welfare schemes of the state government reach the common people quickly." The ad rates would depend on the number of followers the influencer has. The Rajasthan government will also pay for tweets with the lowest category of social media influencers (with a minimum of 10,000 followers), getting Rs 1,000 per tweet.

In the Modi government, Union ministers S Jaishankar, Smriti Irani, Piyush Goyal and Rajeev Chandrasekhar have been first off the mark, giving interviews to social influencers even before the empanelment exercise of MeitY. There is perhaps a realisation that people are moving away from TV and newspapers and switching to social media.

The Reuters Foundation Digital News Report (2023) on India suggests they may be right. It notes, "Digital-born brands, while not as popular in reach as legacy media brands, are attracting dedicated and engaged audiences". At the same time, it notes a 12 percentage point fall in the consumption and sharing of news for online news portals from last year and an 11 percentage point fall in social media as a news source. Television news declined 10 percentage points over the previous year among urban-based viewers and youth. Ironically, the fall may be attributed to perceptions of declining integrity because they have been seen as cheerleaders of the regime.
 

For political users, influencers have several initial advantages over traditional news media. They have no prior commitment to hardcore political or investigative journalism and may be amenable to highlighting whatever they are asked to project without critical distancing. What Akshay Kumar and Bear Grylls, with their star appeal, did in promoting the Prime Minister nationwide earlier will be done in a more segmented way, changing perceptions of groups of niche followers. Social media influencers will almost certainly be much easier to influence than the voluble and highbrow public intellectuals, whom the regime finds hard to influence in an already polarised field. Its alienation from such professional intellectuals and their politically discerning audiences is evident in the labels they have coined for them: "Lutyens gang", "Khan Market gang", or the "Tukde-tukde gang".

Consumers of social media, on the other hand, are unlikely to be overly critical of what influencers tell them. The undecided and the fence-sitter voter will be comparatively easy pickings when approached through social media influencers. The softer image of the easy, accessible, man-or-woman-next-door image that a politician can project this way may find easier acceptance with them. The mandatory warning that the message or programme was "in collaboration with MyGov" may not make much difference to them either.

These developments are taking place when the Indian print and television media, as the Reuters Digital New Report notes, is impacted by declining interest in news, loss of credibility and shrinking revenues. They will likely hasten the decline of the legacy media while providing a viable revenue model to hitherto economically unstable social media news and entertainment purveyors.

The share of government advertising in traditional media, which accounts for a disproportionately large share of their ad revenue, will shrink as more competitors vie for the same ad pie. Studies have shown that since 2017, there has been a steady movement of the Union government's advertising budgets away from legacy media to social media and its own publicity departments.

Already newspapers have become thinner, their news coverage patchy as news budgets become smaller, and there is increasing reliance on government handouts, and news agency reports as the size of newsrooms goes down. Over the last five years, many newspapers of national repute and TV news channels have shut down their regional offices and laid off journalists.

The government's new policy would also impact the social media space itself by possibly squeezing independent journalism on social media platforms. Several well-known and credible journalists from television have started their own YouTube news channels – the new government initiative could shift the ad-revenue balance from them towards social media influencers embedded in the official publicity structure.

Social media giants – Google, Twitter and Meta – are more than willing to cooperate with the government's digital project. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, is investing US$10 billion in India's digitisation programme and is also investing in the company's global fintech operations based in GIFT City Gujarat. Elon Musk has also agreed to make Twitter conform to local laws and do its "best to provide free speech that is possible under the law." He also plans to bring Tesla, his electric car business, to India.

With social media giants desperate to please the Indian government and the often opaque algorithms determining their use, the space for critical news necessary for making informed decisions in a healthy democracy could contract even further.

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the writer. They do not reflect the views of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper