Questions Over Financing of Union Ministers’ Interviews With YouTube Influencers

Union ministers S. Jaishankar, Piyush Goyal, among others have appeared on these YouTube channels for interviews, which are ‘in collaboration with MyGov’. However, there is opaqueness with regard to terms of ‘collaboration’ between these social media influencers and the citizen engagement platform.

A series of interviews with Union ministers conducted by social media influencers in collaboration with MyGov have raised questions about the Modi government’s use of public funds to finance interactions between influencers and senior government functionaries as well as the terms of these interactions.

Intriguingly, the Government of India also published front-page advertisements in prominent newspapers endorsing some select social media influencers, with their images and the mention of their YouTube channels. The captions read as follows: “To stay safe online, hit pause”  and “Trust only the real experts”.

On Sunday, June 25, Press Trust of India reported, citing a commerce and industry ministry official, that Union minister Piyush Goyal held an interaction with over 50 top-performing Youtubers in the country on various issues like popularising handicrafts, benefits of millets and consumer awareness on June 23.

Youtubers who participated in the discussions included Vivek Bindra, Gaurav Chaudhary (Technical Guruji), Viraj Sheth (Co-founder Monk Entertainment), Ganesh Prasad (Think School), Shlok Srivastava (Tech burner), Prafull Billore (MBA Chai Wala), and Anushka Rathod (Anushka Rathod Finance), among others, the ministry official was quoted as saying.

The report added that the YouTubers expressed their willingness to produce content on their channels about government programmes and policies to educate their audience and also work as fact checkers countering misinformation.

In the last fortnight, YouTuber Ranveer Allahabadia interviewed Union ministers including Rajeev Chandrashekhar, Union Minister of State for Entrepreneurship, Skill Development, Electronics & Technology; Dr S. Jaishankar, Union Minister for External Affairs; and Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal. Allahabadia’s YouTube channel, Beer Biceps, has 5.61 million followers. He has gained popularity on social media with his flagship show titled “The Ranveer Show”.

These interviews have also been promoted by the ministers on Twitter.

The podcast interviews with Jaishankar and Goyal have garnered over 5 million and 1 million views respectively as of Monday, June 26 evening while Chandrashekhar’s video interview, which was uploaded on Sunday, June 25, has got over 1,49,000 views.

A reading of the description of all three interviews shows that the focus is on government initiatives.

“We talked about many topics like the thought behind Banning PUBG and TikTok, Cryptocurrency, Web 3.0, Reversing Brain Drain, Artificial Intelligence, and much more,” reads the description of Chandrashekhar’s interview.

Goyal’s interview is described as “one of the most informative episodes”, on the Beer Biceps channel.

“He talked about his time with our Former Prime Minister Mr. Atal Bihari Vajpayee and how he positively impacted his life. He further spoke about the different focal points that the Government of India focuses on including Tourism and Biodiversity. He also shared his thoughts on the future of Youth in India and how the youth, content creators, and entrepreneurs can help India become a better place,” the description adds.

Jaishankar’s interview description reads: “In this informative episode, Dr. Subrahmanyam Jaishankar talked about topics that are closely related to Geopolitics. He shares his experience of working with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and what are the challenges he has to face as the Minister of External Affairs. He further discusses the Role of Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Computing in the field of Geopolitics and put light on the situation of Brain Drain in the Country.”

All three videos with Union ministers state that the interviews are in collaboration with MyGov. “MyGov serves as a citizen engagement platform facilitating communication between citizens and the government. This voluntary, unpaid partnership focuses on active public engagement,” it says.

However, in an earlier interview with Sanjeev Sanyal, economic advisor to Prime Minister Modi, uploaded on April 7, no such collaboration phrases are described.

Allahabadia is not the only YouTube influencer conducting these ‘collaboration interviews’ with top Union government officials. Another YouTuber Raj Shamani has also uploaded similar exclusive interviews on his YouTube channel in recent weeks.

In comparison to Allahabadia, Shamani’s YouTube channel ‘Raj Shamani’ has a relatively smaller following of 1.3 million.

Like Allahabadia, Shamani’s interviews include the phrase “in collaboration with MyGov” in their description boxes.

On May 31, Shamani uploaded an interview with Nitin Gadkari, Union minister for Road Transport and Highways, which has received over 2 million views.

While another interview with Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan uploaded on June 10 does not include any reference to a collaboration with MyGov, the description says that the interaction covers aspects of the Chouhan government’s initiatives for women empowerment the “secrets behind the cleanliness of Indore and Bhopal”.

“Explore the Chief Minister’s vision for the future, as he shares the next targets for Madhya Pradesh’s progress,” it says.

According to Apar Gupta, founder of the Internet Freedom Foundation, MyGov is used by the Modi government as a platform to engage with citizens on a broad range of issues including public consultations.

He told The Wire that the “question is whether MyGov as a government agency in a sense is commissioning online influencers to arrange such interviews and secondly, if such engagement is being done are proper notices and disclaimers being provided to the audience?”

“Even if these are not paid engagements, there is a need to be critical of such interviews given that quite often there is little to no incentive or training provided to these influencers to question public officials or be more critical of their claims or to even scrutinise,” he added.

According to the tender released by the Ministry of Electronics and Information and Technology (MeitY) on March 7, inviting proposals  for the empanelment of various Agencies (Social Media Marketing Agencies) handling Influencer Marketing or specialised Influencer Marketing, the objective of the exercise is as follows:

“To reach out to a wider targeted population and enhance citizen engagement to a higher level, MyGov proposes to empanel Social Media Marketing Agencies handling Influencer Marketing or specialized Influencer Marketing Agencies to onboard in and effectively manage a wide cross-section of influencers.”

According to Gupta, the move is important ahead of the general election in 2024.

“As we head towards elections, existing usage patterns are changing as people are varying their media diet to internet-based content from television. As a result, public officials as well as politicians are engaging more with digital users with very large following.”

While some of these video interviews may bear the “collaboration with MyGov” tag, it does not stand as a true disclaimer.

“The terms of the collaboration are not very clear. The disclaimer has to provide adequate notice whether it is a paid collaboration whether it has been arranged by MyGov or whether there has been a brief or even questions that have been shared by MyGov. Even if these interactions are unpaid, are there any guidelines for MyGov even if it is unpaid?

“It is also an issue of media ethics, just because it is digital, the nature of public broadcast cannot become one-sided puffing up government claims as advertorials. Selectivity of partnership is critical for us to understand.”

Speaking to The Wire, Shamani said that his channel partnering with MyGov was not in connection with the tender issued by the MeitY in March.

“We spoke to MyGov and requested them to help us do the conversation with leaders as MyGov serves as a citizen engagement platform facilitating communication between citizens and the government,” he said.

“This is a voluntary, unpaid partnership. We didn’t receive or charge any money for it, we were never offered anything.”

Shamani said that there were no terms or conditions set by MyGov for the interview. “(No), there were no terms, all questions were prepared by our in-house team. We wanted to understand the mindset of leaders and that’s what we did.”

When asked about whether the Chouhan interview was in collaboration with MyGov due to the absence of the phrase in the description on YouTube, Shamani said that it was “like any other podcast”.

“Because that was just like any other podcast, where we reached out and the CM team accepted our request, post that we shoot, edit, and ask questions all by ourselves. MyGov has zero involvement in that, they just facilitate conversation between a citizen and government leaders,” he said.Shamani added that while there are no other interviews planned yet, his channel is in talks “with a lot of people and would love to get more leaders on our podcast from across the country”.

Meanwhile, Union minister Rajeev Chandrashekar tweeted, saying that the government does not “endorse” any person or social media platform. Taking to Twitter, he wrote:

However, it has to be noted that since 2017, the Union government’s advertising spending has steadily moved away from legacy publications – both print and broadcast – and towards social media and its own publicity arm, The Morning Context reported.

The Wire has reached out to Rajeev Kumar Jain, director general of the Press Information Bureau, MeitY, for a comment over phone, WhatsApp, and email. This story will be updated if and when he responds.

Note: This article has been updated since publication to add Raj Shamani’s comments. Both Shamani and Ranveer Allahabadia have been contacted for comments.