In March 2026, Meta published what it had removed in late 2025. Buried in the CIB section is a small network with a loud costume: Baloch journalists, Baloch flags, a blog called The Balochistan Diaries.
Meta says it was not a newsroom. It says the set belonged to ISPR, the Pakistani military's press wing.
The haul was modest. 23 Facebook accounts, 8 Pages, 14 Instagram accounts. About 64,000 people followed at least one Page. About 5,000 followed the Instagram side. Ads cost about $3,000, paid mostly in rupees. A peer company tipped Meta. Meta does not name the peer.
The accounts were built to look local. Fake names. Stolen photos of people in regional dress. Posts that praised Baloch culture. Those same accounts ran the Pages, bought the ads, and pushed the posts so the whole thing read as a grassroots bench from the province. Meta names one journalist persona: Abbas Bugti.
The writing sat on a site, thebalchistandiaries.com, and spilled onto X and YouTube. The line was unity and love for the center. The comments were the tell. Meta says operators used AI to pick targets, write English and Urdu, and generate photorealistic "journalist" video interviews. Captions and comment threads came out clean and even. They praised the government. They needled regional rivals.
That last phrase is as far as Meta goes. It does not print a claim list. It does not say how much of the needling was about India versus anyone else. It does not hand over the account IDs.
What this is, if you take Meta at its word: a military comms desk wearing a provincial face. Real Baloch politics. Fake grassroots. AI doing the volume. Coordination plus fake identity is Meta's CIB bar. The spend, the stolen faces, and the off-site blog are why this is not just "Pakistan posts nationalism."
What this is not: a reason to call every Baloch reporter a cutout. Algometica did not crawl the graph. The work here is reading the report and writing down what it actually names.
If the site or the leftover videos are still up, the next piece can pull the actual lines. If they are gone, the file stops here.