This AI cockroach is Instagram's fastest growing account

—by Adam Bumas

We normally send out our monthly Garbage Intelligence trend reports on the first Friday of every month. They’re usually for paying subscribers, but we’re sharing this story with our whole audience today because we’ve come across something more popular than any trend or post we’ve ever recorded. It’s smashed all of our records. It’s an AI-generated cockroach on Instagram.

It’s the mascot of the “Cockroach Janta Party,” an Indian student movement that exploded into the national conversation last month. The account has been described as a parody, but its style of humor is nothing we haven’t seen from global politicians in the past decade. In India, however, the joke is new enough, and its messaging clear enough, that it got an astounding 22 million followers on Instagram in the last two weeks of May. We’ve never seen anything like it.

Let’s start with the name “Cockroach Janta Party.” It’s a joke on the Bharatiya Janata Party (janta and janata mean “the people” in Hindi), the Hindu nationalist political party that’s ruled India since 2014 under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Even a joke on the party’s name is a genuine risk. In the past few years, Modi’s government has gradually imposed tighter restrictions on anything online that criticizes the government, with further censorship targeting internet randos on the way.

Not coincidentally, Modi’s official accounts have appeared at the top of our “most popular” lists many times before, on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (back when it was called that and we had access to its data). Looking back that far shows how impressive these numbers are. We’ve only seen 10 million Instagram followers gained in a single month once before, for the Brazilian YouTuber Felipe “Felca” Bressanim last year. Felca’s followers came after he uploaded a documentary on content creators exploiting children. The video was such an important political talking point that when Brazil passed a new online age verification law this March, official news sources called it the “Felca Law.”

Of course, it’s not as if banning kids from the internet isn’t enormously popular around the world, with or without YouTubers. Meaning that explaining all those Instagram followers is a chicken-and-egg question. Did Felca lead a movement, or capitalize on one that already existed? You can ask a similar question of the Cockroach Janta Party.

The group’s name comes from an old-fashioned political gaffe. On May 15th, Surya Kant, India’s Chief Justice, compared young people who couldn’t find jobs and supported anti-government activism to “cockroaches.” Abhijeet Dipke, a recent graduate from Boston University, created the Instagram account the next day, and got more followers than the BJP’s official account in four days. As a side note, Dipke himself had the third-biggest account on Instagram in May, with more than a million new followers.

But one stupid comment isn’t enough to summon a movement like this. To use a US comparison, “basket of deplorables” didn’t win the 2016 election any more than “nasty woman” lost it. But the issue of activist youth has been enormous in South Asia. Last year, we wrote about how Nepal elected a Prime Minister via a Discord poll, after the government was overthrown by a viral student movement inspired by posts from a similar one in the Philippines.

In India, the driving force of the student movement has actually been standardized tests. Earlier in May, the government cancelled all results from this year’s NEET test after the answers were reportedly leaked, forcing 2.2 million students to retake the exam — or else risk becoming the other meaning of NEET. The protests only got louder after another exam, the CBSE, gave students suspicious results from its new digital grading system. One student went viral on X after posting the official answer sheets for his “unexpectedly low marks,” claiming he had been graded for another student’s work.

Most of the Cockroach Janta Party’s political positions are related to these protests. One of the account’s first posts was a “five point plan” for reforms, but their more recent posts have been focused on calling for the resignation of India’s Education Minister. They’ve also been posting weird AI-generated campaign videos, chatter about Dipke’s media hits, and an official song with a title taken from an old commercial.

(instagram.com/p/DYpPrqFs1Dz)

This is all astonishingly good posting. Good as in “effective,” not necessarily “I like it.” Personally I’m mixed on the posts — sure, the song goes hard, but why is the AI cockroach wearing some kind of Tron hoodie?

Regardless of my tastes, the Cockroach Janta Party has a truly impressive sense of balance between serious political organizing, submitting to the algorithm, and Having Fun Online. Dipke, who started websites and petitions at the same time as the Instagram account, seems to deserve a lot of the credit for this. He has previous organizing experience in India and a degree in public relations from a US college. So he has both institutional knowledge and youthful authenticity in multiple different cultures, at a time when those linguistic barriers are starting to break down.

But other barriers, like the BJP’s censorship, are standing strong. The Cockroach Janta Party’s website was reportedly blocked in India, and its official X account was suspended — just like so many other accounts critical of Modi’s government. These silly shitposts are genuinely dangerous, and the 22 million followers all understand that.

Seeing movements like this, or Felca’s, centered on Instagram can be surprising when the platform’s algorithm keeps it so stagnant. But when something gets big enough on Instagram to start changing things, that same inertia keeps it in motion, and the algorithm will keep the users’ demands in the conversation. An important lesson for anyone feeling pessimistic about the state of things right now.