On Tuesday, the day after the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump, many Instagram and Facebook users found themselves following him on the social media apps even though they had not 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. It added that there were some other bugs in the process that may have mucked up the gears of the transition.
Let’s walk through what happened.
Why am I following Donald Trump, Melania Trump and JD Vance on Instagram and Facebook?
Just as the federal government has to deal with the transition of power between administrations, Meta has to deal with it, too.
For years, companies like Meta and X — previously known as Facebook and Twitter, respectively — have had to handle the social media accounts held by the office of the president as it changed hands after an election. That ramped up after Barack Obama took office in 2008 and fully embraced social media to garner support from voters digitally. By 2016, the companies needed to figure out how to hand those accounts off between administrations.
Meta and X decided that the official POTUS, VP and first lady accounts on Facebook, Instagram and X would be switched to the new administration while retaining the existing followers of those accounts. That meant that if you followed President Obama in 2016, you were automatically switched over 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. Trump’s account reset with none of Mr. Obama’s old posts attached.
That transition occurred 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 switch occurred again. That’s why you may be seeing his posts in your feed now.
But I swear I wasn’t following any presidential accounts before.
Lots of people have said this week that they never followed Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump before and are sure they have been added as followers against their will.
Meta said it wasn’t forcing people to follow Mr. Trump.
“People were not made to automatically follow any of the official Facebook or Instagram accounts for the president, vice president or first lady,” Andy Stone, a Meta spokesman, said in a statement on 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 what accounts they signed up to follow.
When I try to unfollow these accounts, the apps won’t let me. What’s up with that?
This is where it’s not you, it’s Meta.
The company said it “may take some time for follow and unfollow requests to go through” as the account transitions occur. It is possible that the company is receiving such a high volume of unfollow requests during the transition that it is running into errors processing them all.
Meta claims it will be sorted out soon, but declined to go into detail on why it was happening.
Why am I seeing recommendations to follow President Trump’s and Vice President Vance’s accounts?
This is another instance of a sweeping change at 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. That meant people saw fewer posts and accounts related to politicians and contentious social issues. It was Meta’s way of making its platform seem, well, a bit nicer.
But this year, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, did an about-face and started reinserting political content into people’s feeds. He and others at Meta said that was because they heard people wanted to see more political content again. The change was part of a larger shift at Meta to allow more types of posts and content to spread across its platform in the Trump era.
You can change your settings in Facebook and Instagram to see fewer political posts.
I’m also seeing people talk about censoring Democrats on social media. What is that about?
Add this one to the list of Meta’s screw-ups.
On Tuesday, people began noticing that they could not search for posts that included the hashtag “#democrats” on some of Meta’s apps. That, along with the new Trump administration and Mr. Zuckerberg’s recent embrace of Mr. Trump, led people to believe that the company was forcing posts from Democrats out of their apps.
Not true, Meta said, adding it had made an unfortunate error that it was working quickly to fix. Mr. Stone said that because of the error, users were unable to search for a gamut of topics and the mistake was affecting “not just those on the left.”
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