On Tuesday, the day after President Donald J. Trump’s inauguration, many Instagram and Facebook users followed him on the social media apps even though they hadn’t signed up to do so.
What gives?
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, said it was part of a regular process in which White House social media accounts are handed over when a new president takes office. He added that there were several other glitches in the process that may have disrupted the gears of the transition.
Let’s go through what happened.
Why am I following Donald Trump, Melania Trump and JD Vance on Instagram and Facebook?
Just as the federal government must deal with the transition of power between administrations, Meta must also deal with it.
For years, companies like Meta and X — formerly known as Facebook and Twitter, respectively — have had to handle the social media accounts maintained by the president’s office as it changed hands after the election. This grew after Barack Obama took office in 2008 and fully embraced social media to get support from voters digitally. By 2016, companies had to figure out how to file those accounts between administrations.
Meta and X decided that the official POTUS, VP, and First Lady Facebook, Instagram, and X accounts would transition to the new administration while retaining the existing followers of those accounts. This meant that if you followed President Obama in 2016, you were automatically switched to follow President Trump when he took office in his first administration in 2017. Mr Obama’s posts were archived under a different handle, while Mr Obama’s account Mr. Trump’s was restored without any of Mr. Obama’s old posts attached.
This transition happened again in 2020, when Joseph R. Biden Jr. was elected and took over the official presidential account. On Monday, after Mr. Trump was sworn in, the change happened again. That’s why you can see his posts in your feed now.
But I swear I never followed any presidential account before.
Many people have said this week that they have never followed Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump before and are sure they were added as followers against their will.
Meta said he was not forcing people to follow Mr. Trump.
“People are not automatically forced to follow any of the official Facebook or Instagram accounts for the president, vice president, or first lady,” Andy Stone, a Meta spokesperson, said in a statement to Threads. “Those accounts are managed by the White House, so with a new administration, the content on those pages changes.”
One possible explanation: Four years between administrations is a long time, and people can forget which accounts they signed up to follow.
When I try to unfollow these accounts, the apps won’t let me. What’s up with that?
It’s not you here, it’s Meta.
The company said it “may take some time for tracking and cancellation requests to be processed” as account transitions occur. It’s possible that the company receives such a high volume of unfollow requests during the transition that it’s running into errors processing them all.
Meta claims it will be resolved soon, but declined to elaborate on why it was happening.
Why am I seeing recommendations to follow President Trump and Vice President Vance’s accounts?
This is another example of a sweeping change in the Meta.
The company previously insisted that users did not want to see political content across its apps and had removed that type of content on Facebook, Instagram and Threads. This meant that people saw fewer posts and accounts about politicians and controversial social issues. It was Meta’s way of making her platform look a little nicer.
But this year, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, did an about-face and began reintroducing political content to people’s feeds. He and others at Meta said it was because they heard people wanted to see more political content again. The change was part of a larger overhaul of Meta to allow more types of posts and content to spread across its platform in the Trump era.
You can change your Facebook and Instagram settings to see fewer political posts.
I’m also seeing people talking about censoring Democrats on social media. What is it about?
Add this to the list of Meta scandals.
On Tuesday, people started noticing that they couldn’t search for posts that included the hashtag “#democrats” on some of Meta’s apps. This, along with the new Trump administration and Mr.
That’s not true, Meta said, adding that he had made an unfortunate mistake that he was working quickly to fix. Mr Stone said that due to the error, users were unable to search for a range of topics and the error was affecting “not just those on the left”.