Slovenia’s ruling Freedom Movement party and Prime Minister Robert Golob said on Saturday that their Instagram accounts were targeted in a coordinated cyber attack at the start of the country’s election campaign.
Party officials and Golob described the incident as an organised attempt by foreign actors to flood their official social media profiles with fake accounts, potentially to disrupt communications or undermine credibility, according to statements reported by local media. The party said it had detected thousands of new suspicious accounts and took steps to lock down the pages.
“We can confirm it was a cyber attack, not random hacking — an organised attack from abroad,” Golob told a brief news conference in Ljubljana. He suggested that recent patterns point to “Slovenian clients” behind the operation, a comment that echoed broader political concerns about online manipulation ahead of elections.
Party officials said they had reported the incident to Slovenia’s police, the national cyber security centre SI‑CERT, and Meta, the owner of Instagram, and that the attack had been contained without loss of control over the accounts.
Lenart Žavbi, a Freedom Movement lawmaker, said the volume of new profiles — estimated at more than 5,000 — indicated a deliberate attempt to overwhelm the accounts as the election campaign began. The party made its Instagram pages private in response.
Coordinated social media activity has become a feature of political campaigns globally, with analysts saying automated accounts and “bot” networks can be used to amplify messages or distort engagement metrics. Independent cybersecurity experts have noted similar tactics in other European election contexts.