Bengaluru, 30 October

When you cannot beat the system, beat the algorithm. That is the Cockroach Janta Party’s (CJP) new mantra. CJP has now urged supporters to use codewords, satire and humour in social media posts to evade automated content moderation and takedowns.

The strategy follows claims by CJP co-founder Ashutosh Ranka and CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke that thousands of anti-government accounts and videos have been restricted or removed from Instagram. 

Ranka, in a video message, asked followers to avoid naming the Prime Minister and Union ministers, suggesting using terms such as ‘Odi ji’ for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and ‘Gunnu’ for Union Home Minister Amit Shah, alongside coded references such as ‘BCCI’, to avoid triggering “social media filters”.

Their comrade and YouTuber Dhruv Rathee reiterated this, asking people to get smart and fool the algorithm when posting critical posts. Rathee said that in future they will make a platform that shows all censored posts. 

The move comes amid increased scrutiny of social media platforms. On 10 October, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) issued an advisory asking Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, to review its recommendation algorithms and prevent users from being disproportionately exposed to a single or narrow set of narratives. It also asked the company to provide adequate context for potentially misleading posts, manipulated visuals and out-of-context images and videos.

The advisory came amid protests involving CJP supporters and concerns over political content circulating online.

Meanwhile, between March and July 2026, the government issued nearly 1.95 lakh blocking orders to Instagram, Facebook and YouTube, according to data accessed by The Indian Express. This works out to around 1,275 orders a day, or one every 68 seconds.

Instagram received nearly 1 lakh directives, followed by Facebook with around 80,000 and YouTube with nearly 15,000.