On Tuesday, the day after President Donald J. Trump's inauguration, many Instagram and Facebook users found themselves following him on the social media apps even though they weren't registered.
What gives?
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, said this is part of the normal process by which White House social media accounts are taken over when a new president takes office. He added that there were several other bugs along the way that may have messed up the transition gears.
Let's see what happened.
Why do I follow 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, so too does the meta.
For years, companies like Meta and X (formerly known as Facebook and Twitter, respectively) have had to deal with social media accounts held by presidential administrations as governments change hands after elections. The trend accelerated after Barack Obama became president in 2008 and fully embraced social media to digitally rally support from voters. By 2016, companies had to figure out how to transfer these accounts from one administration to another.
Mr. Mehta and Mr. In other words, if you followed President Obama in 2016, you automatically switched to following President Trump when President Trump took office in 2017. Obama's posts were archived under a different handle, but Trump's account was reset without any settings. Attached is Obama's old post.
That change happened again in 2020, when Joseph R. Biden Jr. was elected and took over the official presidential account. On Monday, after Trump was inaugurated, things changed again. That's probably why you're seeing his posts in your feed.
But I swear I haven't followed the president's account before.
This week, many people said they had never followed Biden or Trump before and were sure they were added to their followers against their will.
Mehta said he is not forcing people to follow Trump.
“People are not designed to automatically follow the official Facebook or Instagram accounts of the president, vice president, or first lady,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a statement about the thread. Ta. “These accounts are controlled by the White House, so when there is a change of administration, the content of these pages changes.”
One possible explanation is that four years between administrations is a long time, so people might forget which accounts they signed up to follow.
If you try to unfollow these accounts, you won't be able to unfollow them in the app. What happened to that?
This is Meta's place, not you.
The company said that due to account migration, “follow and unfollow requests may take some time to complete.” It's possible that the company received a large number of unfollow requests during the transition and is experiencing errors in processing all of them.
Meta claims the issue will be resolved soon, but did not provide details on why the issue occurred.
Why am I encouraged to follow President Trump and Vice President Vance's accounts?
This is another example of a fundamental change in the meta.
The company previously claimed that users didn't want to see political content across its apps and had removed that type of content from Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. That means people are less likely to see posts and accounts related to politicians or controversial social issues. This was Meta's way of making their platform look a little better.
But this year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reversed course and started reinserting political content into people's feeds. He and other members of Meta said they heard that people wanted to see more political content again. The change was part of a larger shift at Meta during the Trump era to allow more types of posts and content to be spread across the platform.
You can change your Facebook and Instagram settings to see fewer political posts.
I also see people on social media talking about Democratic censorship. What does that mean?
Add this to your list of meta failures.
On Tuesday, people began noticing that some of Meta's apps were unable to search for posts containing the hashtag “#democrats.” This, combined with the new Trump administration and Zuckerberg's recent embrace of Trump, led people to believe that the company was forcing Democrats' posts off the app.
Mr. Mehta said that was not the case, adding that he had made an unfortunate mistake and was working quickly to correct it. Stone said the mistake prevents users from searching for any topic, and that it affects “not just the left.”
