The Most Patriotic Page on Your Instagram Might Be a Pakistani Military Operation. Five Ways to Check.
In April 2019, Facebook quietly removed 103 pages, groups, and accounts from its platform. Some had over a million followers. Many of them looked like the most patriotic Indian pages on the internet.
The pages were not Indian. They were run by employees of the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR) wing of the Pakistani military.
This is Facebook's own finding. Published in their own press release. Confirmed by their own head of cybersecurity policy.
Sources: Facebook's official takedown announcement, April 2019, Dawn's coverage from Pakistan
In September 2020, a second sweep followed. Facebook removed another 103 pages, 78 groups, 453 Facebook accounts, and 107 Instagram accounts. All originating in Pakistan. Stanford Internet Observatory analysed the network and recorded a finding that should give every Indian pause. Some of the pages were posing as pro-Indian Army fan pages. The likely purpose: to identify Indians who supported the armed forces, so the accounts of those Indians could later be targeted and silenced.
Sources: Stanford Internet Observatory probe, September 2020, Al Jazeera report on the September 2020 takedown
By May 2024, the technique had spread. Meta took down a network of Chinese-origin accounts running fake activist pages targeting the global Sikh community. The pages used AI-generated poster images to look authentic and energetic. Different country, different community, same playbook.
Source: Medianama report on Meta's takedown of Chinese-origin pages, May 2024
The New Playbook
Notice what these operations share. The pages do not look hostile. They look like the most loyal Indian content on your feed. Salute reels. Soldier tribute videos. Border post photos. Tricolour wallpapers. Captions about sacrifice and duty.
The content is bait. The follower list is the catch.
Every Indian who likes such a page hands over a small data point. Who I am. Where I work. Who my friends are. What I respond to emotionally. Multiply that by a hundred thousand followers and the operator has a segmented map of patriotic, defence-leaning Indians, complete with their public profiles, their workplaces, their family connections.
This map is cheap to make and very valuable. It can be used to choose targets for honey traps. It can be used to flood individual accounts with coordinated reports until they are suspended. It can be cross-matched with LinkedIn, electoral rolls and Bhulekh land records to find addresses.
And in 2026, the work that used to take a team of analysts can be done by an AI in an afternoon. The same generative tools that make deepfakes can also write fluent Hindi-Marathi-Punjabi captions, generate fresh poster images by the hundred and run dozens of pages simultaneously. The cost of building a fake patriotic page has fallen close to zero. The yield has not.
The Indian response has been steady but slow. Meta now publishes quarterly Adversarial Threat Reports naming such networks. PIB Fact Check has expanded its mandate. The IT Rules of 2021 and the DPDP Act of 2023 give Indians some recourse.
But Facebook and Instagram cannot stop the next operation before it begins. They can only take it down after it has run for months or years. By then, the follower lists have already been exported.
Which means the most important filter is no longer the platform. It is you.
The 90 Second Test
Before you like or follow the next patriotic page on Instagram or Facebook, run this five step audit. It takes less time than the reel itself.
One. Check when the page was created.
Open the page. Tap "About" or "Page Transparency." Look for the creation date. A page with a million followers that was created last year is suspicious. A real regimental association, veterans' welfare body or established defence publication has a history. Sudden growth on a new page is the signature of a paid operation, not an organic Indian one.
Two. Check who runs it.
The same "Page Transparency" panel shows the country of the page admins. If the admins are in Pakistan, China, Turkey, the UAE or a country with no connection to the content, the page is not what it claims to be. Many such pages hide this. Hidden admins on a patriotic Indian page is itself a red flag.
Three. Check if the organisation is real.
Real veterans' bodies, regimental associations and defence trusts have a name you can search. They have a website. They have a registered address. They have known office bearers. If the page is called something like "Indian Soldiers Forever" or "Bharat Veer Pride" with no named organisation behind it, no website, no founder, no contact details, assume it is a profile-building operation until proven otherwise.
Four. Read the comments.
Real Indian pages have Indian comments. The grammar is recognisable. The mistakes are recognisable. The mix of languages is recognisable. If the comments are oddly formal, oddly uniform or written in slightly off Hindi-English, the kind of polished sentences a non-native writer produces, the engagement itself is being faked. A real Indian page sounds Indian in the comments, not just in the captions.
Five. Audit your own "Following" list tonight.
This is the most important step. Open your Instagram and Facebook accounts. Read your "Following" list as a stranger would. Could a hostile analyst guess your profession, your family connections or your political leanings in sixty seconds? If the answer is yes, and for most defence-connected Indians the answer is yes, your profile is already self-segmented. The fix is simple. Unfollow any anonymous patriotic page that fails steps one through four. Hide your following list under privacy settings. Hide your friends list. Hide your photos to "friends only."
The whole audit takes ninety seconds once you have practised. The first time may take five minutes. Either way, it is shorter than the regret of finding out your face is sitting in a foreign database, tagged with the words "likely Indian Army supporter."
The Deeper Point
The pages are not made for the experts. They are not aimed at the journalist or the cyber analyst. The targets are the ordinary patriotic Indians. The teacher. The shopkeeper. The retired soldier's son. The young aspirant. The cousin in the Gulf who follows defence content from afar.
The goal is not to convert anyone. The goal is to harvest the loyalty that already exists and turn it into a list.
That list is then used in ways the people on it will never see. To pick honey-trap targets. To launch coordinated reporting attacks on Indian voices the operator does not like. To build the OSINT files that adversaries draw from in any future crisis.
This is industrial scale information warfare, and it is running against India every single day.
The good news is that the patriotism is real. The pride is real. The respect for the uniform is real. Nothing about that needs to change.
The only thing that needs to change is where you spend that emotion. Follow named, real, verifiable Indian institutions. Regimental associations with offices and office bearers. Established defence publications with histories. Government handles with verification badges. Veterans' bodies with registered trusts.
Stop feeding the anonymous flag-wavers. Most of them are not on your side.
The bad news is that the next fake patriotic page is already being built. Probably right now. Probably with AI doing most of the work. Probably better disguised than the last one.
Slow down. Run the audit. Then like.