Parti Quebecois's Instagram account adding hundreds of thousands of suspicious followers

The Parti Quebecois (PQ) is not as popular as it seems to be on Instagram.

The number of followers on the PQ's account has been growing by hundreds of thousands over the past week, surpassing all other parties by exponential degrees.

"We don't know why?" said PQ director of communications François Leroux. "It's been happening for a week and a half and the number keeps growing even after the election."

As of Saturday, the PQ has over 425,000 followers on Instagram. The next highest account is Quebec solidaire (QS), which has just over 53,2000 followers. The CAQ has around 12,000 and the Liberals around 6,300.

Leroux said most of the new subscribers are from Thailand, Vietnam or Russia, and that the account now has under 30 per cent of its followers from Canada.

"It's not ideal for us," said Leroux.

He said the party has not found any other cyber-related issues, such as comments or likes on posts.

He said no one has reported receiving messages from the PQ Insta account either.

The Parti Quebecois (PQ) Instagram account has been getting hundreds of thousands of followers from foreign countries in the past week.

"It could be a private citizen buying subscribers for us," he said.

The party has contacted the RCMP's National Cybercrime Coordination Unit and experts are monitoring the situation.

The added followers are only showing up on the PQ Instagram account, Leroux said, and not on their Facebook (around 161,000 followers) or Twitter (around 169,000 followers) accounts.