Is Meta promoting Trump and Vance on Facebook and Instagram?

Meta is hitting back at claims by social media users that they were forced to follow the Facebook and Instagram accounts of US President Donald Trump, his wife Melania Trump and Vice President JD Vance.

The allegations began to heat up on Tuesday, the day after Trump took office, with some users claiming that the platforms, both owned by Meta, made them followers of those accounts without permission.

Pop singer Gracie Abrams said on Instagram that she had to unfollow Trump and Vance’s official pages three times because the platform “keeps following them by default”.

“How curious! I had to block them to make sure I wasn’t even close to that. Sharing if this happens to your account too,” he wrote. Some say that Meta blocks searches for words like “democracy” on its forums by labeling them as sensitive content.

Meta has sent CBC News to social media through its director of communications, Andy Stone.

Stone, writing on the Meta’s Threads forum, said the confusion is because the previous administration controlled the official @POTUS account for the Trump team.

Anyone who followed @POTUS during the Biden administration, for example, will become a follower after account control is handed over to the new administration.

“People are not made to automatically follow any of the official Facebook or Instagram accounts of the President, Vice President or First Lady,” Stone wrote.

Stone did not specifically address the allegations that some users should unfollow those accounts repeatedly, but said “it can take time for requests to be followed and unfollowed as these accounts change hands.”

Katie Harbath, former director of public policy for international elections at Facebook, wrote in Threads that a similar transition occurred between Barack Obama and Trump, and between Trump and Joe Biden in 2017.

“The old one [Facebook pages] it goes to the saved account and the followers remain, but the feed is wiped clean. Most platforms handle it this way,” he said.

There is a growing perception that Big Tech is approaching the Trump administration, said Brett Caraway, an associate professor at the University of Toronto, and that the tension that has been felt by part of the American public has been exacerbated by the presence of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. and other tech executives at Trump’s inauguration.

“With all the concern about the possibility of a dictatorship visiting the United States, one of the first things that usually happens in that situation is that the dictatorship government takes control of the means of communication,” Caraway said.

“I think the general feeling of mistrust and hatred directed at the tech industry is pervasive. And it’s not just on the left. I think it is also on the right side,” he said.

A July 2024 Gallup poll showed that Americans across the political spectrum were equally distrustful of big tech companies; 32 percent of Democrats say they have a lot or a lot of confidence, followed by 28 percent of independents and 20 percent of Republicans.

The survey was conducted by telephone on a random sample of 1,005 adults and has a margin of error of +4 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.

Especially young people have lived through many controversies involving social media companies, such as the scandal of Cambridge Analytica and Facebook and, more recently, the possible ban of TikTok in the US, said Cyrus Beschloss, founder of the Generation Lab in Washington, which studies young people and their relationship with government, media and technology.

“I think they have this kind of subtle mistrust floating in the ether around them,” Beschloss said.

“My biggest question is, does it matter? Young people are still going [use] whatever social media they use.”