Memes and Mantris: Why Instagram won't be easy to win over

For a generation primed on dark jokes and self-deprecation, Instagram success often demands a particular brand of humour that might not come easy for a minister or an institution

Fifteen years ago, Instagram was a place to post sunsets and brunch photos. Today, it is where politicians and parties have millions of followers, and where youth-led movements have been narrated in real time through pictures, reels, stories, and infographics. With an estimated user base approaching 3 billion worldwide, and India being its largest single market, Instagram has the audience density that politicians and political movements cannot ignore. The platform did not set out to be a political actor. But it has become one anyway.

Last week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked his Council of Ministers to strengthen their presence on Instagram, post reels, and hold interactive sessions with young audiences. This followed weeks of student protests, during which Instagram became the place people went to find out reliably what was happening. The app carried a continuous visual record across 34 cities, making the protests legible and shareable even though it was coordinated far more loosely than any conventional campaign.Ministers and organisations being urged onto Instagram in 2026 are not just joining a communication channel. They are entering a space whose norms were written by somebody else. Consider the arithmetic. A satirical page that appeared this summer, run by a graduate student, had passed 20 million followers within weeks, on roughly 50 posts. A major national party's official account, with more than 18,000 posts, sits at under half that figure. It says something about what earns attention here: Not volume of output or institutional weight, but fluency in the native form. On Instagram, incumbents do not start ahead. They start as guests.The vernacular of those protest weeks was not oratory. It was a fit check filmed at a metro station before a march. It was the footage of running, set to Subway Surfers audio, captioned as free cardio. It was somebody noting that the turnout was so large that even the introverts had shown up. Read as politics, this looks unserious. Read as communication, and it is ruthlessly efficient. A caption about eyeliner surviving tear gas delivers a grievance, a mood, and an identity in nine words, which is more than most press releases manage in nine paragraphs. And it invites you in as a participant in a joke rather than a signatory to a position, which is a far lower bar to cross.

But it will be hard for a minister or an institution to be dependably funny at its own expense. The medium's strongest register, self-deprecating humour, will be largely unavailable to institutions, as almost nobody in authority can afford to be the joke. Also, nothing on this platform can be quietly withdrawn. A reel that lands badly is screen-recorded, reshared, and stitched into commentary long before any correction is possible. That same quality, the fact that nothing here can be owned or recalled, is what institutions inherit the moment they arrive.A video gets a million views. Is that good news? A million people can arrive at it for completely different reasons: Some because they liked it, some because somebody sent it saying, look at how bad this is. Both views appear on the same slide, in the same colour, as the same win. Nearly all serious research on Instagram political communication, including the substantial longitudinal work on European parties, measures engagement as volume: Likes, comments, shares. Very little of it measures direction. Attention is not agreement. Sentiment tools exist, but the number that travels up the chain is almost always reach, and reach cannot tell you which of the two you have. The PM's instruction was interaction, not broadcast, and replying is the one honest way to find out which million you have. It is also the reason this will rarely happen at scale. The reel is cheap. The reply is expensive, and what it spends is the comfortable silence that one-way posting protects.

So what should ministers, and everyone else now being sent onto Instagram, take from a summer in which the platform's most fluent users held no office at all? Not that protest has migrated online. Every major online movement of the past 15 years found its scale on a screen and then on the street, and the scholarship consistently finds that these are hybrid campaigns rather than screens substituting physical protests. What changed is the entry cost. It now takes hours rather than years to turn a private grievance into a public identity that strangers will join. Joining an identity, though, costs less than showing up does. The platform makes a movement visible. A month spent standing outdoors makes it count. Advantage here does not go to whoever posts most or spends most. It goes to whoever can explain something difficult in 90 seconds, answer the question nobody prepared them for, and still be in the conversation after the reel ends. That capability transfers to whatever replaces Instagram. A follower count does not.

Author: Prof. Sajith Narayanan, Director, Centre for Digital Advancement, and Faculty of Digital Marketing and Communications, FLAME University.