Non-Violence Project Foundation: Follow Their Leader

Only 18.8% of hate content on Instagram is removed from the platform. Research conducted by Cybersecurity For Democracy has shown that hate content is the type of content with the highest engagement on social platforms, making it extremely lucrative to keep on the platform. Instagram, one of the world’s largest digital companies, claims they don’t have the technology to automatically identify and remove hate content.
So how does a Swedish NGO get one of the world’s biggest social media companies to take responsibility for the content on their platform? By using their own algorithm against them.
Follow Their Leader is a Non-Violence Project Foundation initiative that uses Instagram’s own algorithm to demonstrate that the lack of self-regulation is a matter of profit—not technology. Instagram’s algorithm automatically cracks down on accounts with rapidly growing numbers of fake followers, because fake followers threaten the platform’s economic growth. But extremist content does not.

Follow Their Leader is a crowdfunding platform that purchases fake followers for extremist accounts to trigger Instagram’s algorithm, causing it first to shadow-ban these accounts and eventually remove them entirely.
The campaign was initially launched in niche SoMe subgroups—on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, WhatsApp, and Instagram—among people who sympathized with our message, to avoid alarming the extremists we were targeting. Later, we revealed in an open letter to Instagram that we had hacked their algorithm—shared widely on social media and displayed as outdoor advertising. We even bought media space on a billboard truck that played our message on repeat for 8 hours outside Instagram’s headquarters in San Francisco.

The campaign not only exposed how Instagram ignores extremists and other hateful influencers on their platform—it actively addressed the issue. Follow Their Leader enabled an NGO to hold one of the world’s biggest social media companies accountable for the content on their platform by using their own technology against them. And it worked. Meta has now agreed to meet with The Non-Violence Project Foundation to discuss how Instagram can enforce its own guidelines.