If your Facebook account appears to have automatically followed President Donald Trump this week, you aren’t the only one. Even so, Meta claims this isn’t as sinister as it appears, and is in fact the result of routine operations.
Facebook and Instagram users have accused Meta of artificially boosting Trump’s follower count by forcing people to follow him in the wake of Monday’s inauguration. The issue was raised after several people discovered that their accounts were following the president despite them having given no indication that this was something they’d like to do.
As of writing, the POTUS and White House Facebook pages both have 11 million followers each.
8 ways Mark Zuckerberg changed Meta ahead of Trump’s inauguration
It isn’t entirely unreasonable for users to be suspicious. Meta has been publicly cosying up to Trump recently, enacting numerous policy changes to better align itself with the new administration’s agenda and win the president’s favour. Trump has also shown himself to be enamoured with the number of people consuming his social media. The millions of views his TikTok videos have accumulated even seemed to influence his recent delay of the app’s U.S. ban.
Further, between Trump’s sweeping executive orders and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s policy shifts, it’s clear that the typical rules of engagement no longer apply. However, Meta says this isn’t what it looks like.
Why is my Facebook account following Trump?
Addressing the issue on both Threads and X, Meta communications director Andy Stone stated that the tech giant is not forcing Facebook and Instagram users to automatically follow President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, or First Lady Melania Trump. Rather, the official social media accounts for the White House have simply been transferred to the new administration.
“Those accounts are managed by the White House so with a new administration, the content on those Pages changes,” said Stone. “This is the same procedure we followed during the last presidential transition.”
Mashable Light Speed
As such, anyone who had been following former President Joe Biden, former Vice President Kamala Harris, or former First Lady Jill Biden would have suddenly found themselves following the Trump administration equivalents in each role.
Not everyone has been satisfied with Meta’s explanation, though. Some claim that they had not been following any political accounts, yet were still drafted by Facebook to follow Trump. Others note that the offending Trump administration accounts had just been created this month. A few have further stated that their follow history indicated they’d just followed Trump this month, rather than been grandfathered in.
Still, Meta public affairs director Nkechi Nneji told CBS News that some of these people may have simply forgotten that they’d followed U.S. government accounts.
“Meta doesn’t make anyone follow any account and we never have,” said Nneji.
Credit: Screenshot: Mashable
Former Facebook public policy director Katie Harbath also weighed in to explain the accounts’ suspicious creation dates, as well as the timing on users’ follows. It seems that while Meta behaves as though they’re simply handing over social media accounts to the next administration, they do technically create entirely new ones. Meta simply gives the new administration’s pages the same followers and URL as their predecessor’s, so it effectively functions as though it were the same account.
This means that the former administration’s accounts can be archived, albeit under a new URL. As such, Biden’s presidential Facebook page and his White House’s page can both still be viewed as they were up until Trump’s inauguration this week.
“[M]y team set up the first ways of having to do this when Trump won in 2016 and we had to transfer the official accounts that President Obama’s team created when Facebook pages were first created,” Harbath wrote on Threads. “Same was done during the transfer from Trump to Biden. The old ones go to an archived account and the followers remain, but the feed is wiped clean. Most platforms handle it this way.”
Unfortunately, clearing your follow list of unwanted intruders isn’t as simple as going through and unfollowing any accounts you’d rather not see right now. Some users have expressed frustration after repeatedly attempting to unfollow Trump, only to find themselves involuntarily following him once more.
Stone warns that it may take a little longer than usual to opt out of (or into) Trump’s updates “as these accounts change hands.” So if you’d rather not see them, you might be happier logging off from Facebook and Instagram for a while.
