At the end of last week, students participating in the “Students-in-blockade” protest movement (Studenti u blokadi) informed the public via social media that they had noticed huge increase in fake followers on their profiles. They expressed suspicion that the purpose of this action was to shut down their Instagram accounts. The suspicions proved accurate: this is an operation of large scale, unlike any seen before, but with a fast and appropriate reaction its intent was prevented and damage avoided, according to Serbian TV N1.
A similar attack of this kind, almost at the same time, was also launched against the Instagram account of Macedonian media outlet Sloboden Pechat, which has since been locked to prevent further bot activity.
The “Students in Blockade” in Serbia first noticed a sudden spike in the number of followers on the Instagram profile “Students in Blockade,” which has over 1 million followers. At the same time attacks were occurring on the profiles of individual faculties.
“This obviously represents one of the pathetic attempts to control the population and prevent the spread of free thought that calls for rebellion against the rotten regime,” stated the “Poljoprivredni blokada” (Agriculture Students in Blockade) profile.
As soon as they noticed suspicious activity on the profiles, the “IT Blokada” Association issued an immediate statement calling for urgent assistance, labeling the incident a coordinated campaign aimed at erasing key information channels.
Ako ste mislili da sa svojim polupismenim kadrom i botovima možete da nadmudrite alumni klub najvećeg fakuleta u ovom delu Evrope…
Iz naših učionica izašlo je hiljade i hiljade inženjera koji rade u najvećim svetskim kompanijama, uključujući i Metu.
Više sreće drugi put! 😘— FTN SE BUDI (@ftn_se_budi) November 17, 2025
“If you thought that with your semi-literate staff and bots you could outsmart the alumni club of the largest faculty in this part of Europe… Thousands and thousands of engineers who work in the largest global companies, including Meta, have come out of our classrooms,” stated the post on the X profile of the Faculty of Technical Sciences (FTN) named “FTN se budi,” meaning “FTN wakes up.”
Other student groups have also regained control over their profiles, but who exactly attacked them remains unknown for now.
“Until now, the attacks were carried out through institutions or certain state organizations. This is a new type of attack, in my opinion one of the ‘more creative attacks,’ where the goal is to silence the students’ voice,” said Balša Bulatović.
He added that Instagram is the main means of communication with people, and that if the profiles with the largest number of followers were shut down, “the students’ contact with the rest of the world would automatically be cut off.”
High motivation and intent by the actors behind the attack
Professor Djordje Krivokapic, founder of the digital rights organization SHARE Foundation confirmed in a statement for N1 TV that the profiles were successfully restored through collective action. He categorized the incident not as hacking but as a manipulative attack involving the abuse of online mechanisms.
He noted that such a coordinated attack, involving hundreds of thousands of new followers from “Eastern markets,” is unprecedented in scope and clearly requires significant resources and organization, pointing to a high motivation behind the perpetrator, though their identity is currently unverified.
Since the student blockades in Serbia began, following the collapse of the canopy at the railway station in Novi Sad, social networks have become the students’ main channel of communication. Their voices could not be heard on nationally broadcast television stations, including the public service. It was precisely this communication channel that cast a shadow over traditional reporting, and their social-media profiles became their way of reaching the wider public.
Regarding the attack on their profile, the students of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering (ETF) in Blockade shared a 1988 quote by the Polish film director Andrzej Wajda:
“Only what stays within the range of the censor’s imagination can be censored. Create something really original and censors will throw away all their scissors and mumbo jumbo…”
In the first week of November, a similar attack began against one of the most-read and most-followed Macedonian media outlets, Sloboden Pechat. The attack involved hundreds of comments with identical content, which caused Instagram’s algorithm to impose a so-called “shadow ban” on the profile. In addition to the comments, the bots also left an extremely large number of likes on Instagram posts, coming from various locations, including India. In an attempt to protect themselves from the attack, the newsroom locked their Instagram profile. Meta.mk published an extensive article about the attack, and when the Macedonian language version of that article was posted on Instagram, it too was targeted by bots.
Coordinated bot attack forces Macedonian newspaper Sloboden Pechat to lock its Instagram account
