Instagram controversy in Slovenia's election campaign

As Slovenia moves closer to the 22 March general election, a dispute over what happened on Instagram has evolved into a broader debate about digital manipulation, national security and political narrative - and for several days overshadowed all other campaign topics in a high-stakes campaign that many already consider the dirtiest ever fought.

The controversy began when the Instagram profiles of Prime Minister Robert Golob and his Freedom Movement were flooded with thousands of apparently fake followers in a short period of time last weekend.

Party officials temporarily set the accounts to private, citing the risk that the platform could suspend them for coordinated inauthentic activity, CE Report quotes The Slovenia Times.

Shortly afterwards, the government's official Instagram account experienced a similar spike in activity, including hundreds of identical three-word comments posted within two minutes, according to the Government Communications Office.

The National Security Council said on 26 February there were "reasonable grounds" to suspect that international organised crime may be behind what it described as a "multi-faceted cyberattack." The authorities had previously indicated the fake accounts were based out of Iran, though they were quick to point out that this was not a smoking gun showing Iran was actually behind the attack.

State Secretary for National Security Vojko Volk warned that Slovenia was confronting a reality in which "machines rather than people" could have a decisive impact on elections. He linked the incident to broader patterns of foreign cyberthreats seen in other European countries, although he acknowledged that organised crime playing such a role in elections would represent a new development.

Police, the national cyber response centre SI-CERT and Instagram's owner Meta have been notified, an a criminal investigation is ongoing.

Disputed terminology

Not everyone agrees with the official characterisation of the events, or the notion that this was the kind of incident that merits the publicity it generated.

Boštjan Kežmah, a cybersecurity specialist at the University of Maribor, told the Slovenian Press Agency that operations involving thousands of coordinated accounts require automation, infrastructure and technical know-how. However, he noted that there was no evidence of hacking, unauthorised access or data breaches.

Based on publicly available information, he described the episode as a "targeted information campaign" exploiting the features of social media platforms rather than a cyberattack in the conventional sense.

He also questioned whether disruption on a commercial platform constitutes a national security threat, given that Instagram is neither critical infrastructure nor the government's primary official communication channel because it requires users to register an account in order to follow those who post there.

Even so, Kežmah cautioned that such campaigns can degrade the information environment, amplify noise and make it harder for voters to distinguish authentic engagement from manipulation - a concern that is particularly pertinent during an election period.

The politics of reaction

Prominent political analyst Luka Lisjak Gebrijelčič argued that the purely technological impact of the incident is unlikely to be decisive. Unlike large-scale disinformation operations documented elsewhere in Europe, he said, the Slovenian case does not appear capable of directly influencing the vote.

What could matter more, he suggested, is the political reaction to the incident. A party that presents itself as the target of an attack may initially benefit from public sympathy. But if the framing is perceived as exaggerated, that sympathy can erode.

The entire episode has unfolded against a backdrop of intense online polarisation. Many social media users, especially those on the right of the political spectrum, accused the Freedom Movement of overstating the incident to deflect criticism and curry sympathy with voters; the party has maintained that the kind of coordinated digital manipulation it witnessed amounts to interference in democratic discourse.

The influencer kerfuffle

Complicating the public debate was the arrest of influencer and provocateur Aleksandar Repić on suspicion of extortion. A convicted criminal who has served prison time, he was briefly apprehended for the duration of house searches right after bragging that he had sent his legions of followers to flood the Freedom Movement and Golob's Instagram accounts to thwart a poll they had published.

In social media discourse, this and the reported bot attack became conflated, though they appear to have been completely separate things. When Repić was arrested, many social media users, and even some prominent conservative public figures and media outlets, started to frame the police action as a government attempt to silence critics, portraying Repić as a victim.

The police went out of their way to explain that the events are unrelated and that the investigation targeting the influencer - who is believed to have been extorting a suspected sex offender for hundreds of thousands of euros - had started long before the Instagram attacks.

For voters, the immediate policy stakes of the election - healthcare, housing, taxes, security - remain unchanged. And yet, the days-long dispute over Instagram shows how campaign dynamics increasingly play out in digital spaces, where technical incidents, political messaging and online narratives quickly intertwine and become blurred to the point where it is difficult to make out what the truth is.

Photo: dpa/STA