If your Facebook account seems to be following President Donald Trump by default this week, you’re not alone. However, Meta says that this is not as bad as it seems, and is actually the result of normal operations.
Facebook and Instagram users accused Meta of illegally boosting Trump’s follower count by forcing people to follow him after Monday’s inauguration. This issue was brought up after many people found out that their accounts were following the president even though they did not reveal anything to show that this was something they would like to do.
As of this writing, the POTUS and White House Facebook pages both have 11 million followers each.
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It’s not entirely unreasonable for users to be suspicious. Meta has been publicly aligning with Trump recently, making several policy changes to better align with the new administration’s agenda and curry favor with the president. Trump also showed interest in the number of people who use social media. The millions of views his TikTok videos have accumulated even seem to influence his recent delay in banning the app in the US.
In addition, between Trump’s executive orders and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s policy changes, it is clear that the usual rules of engagement no longer apply. However, Meta says this is not what it seems.
Why is my Facebook account following Trump?
Addressing the issue on both Threads and X, Meta’s director of communications Andy Stone said 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. Instead, the White House’s official social media accounts were simply transferred to the new administration.
“Those accounts are managed by the White House so with the new administration, the content on those pages changes,” Stone said. “This is the same process we followed during the last presidential transition.”
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Therefore, anyone who followed former President Joe Biden, former Vice President Kamala Harris, or former First Lady Jill Biden would have found themselves following the equivalent of the Trump administration in each role.
Not everyone is satisfied with Meta’s definition, however. Some said they weren’t following any political accounts, yet were still being blacklisted by Facebook for following Trump. Some note that the Trump administration’s negative accounts were just created this month. A few also said their follow history indicated they had just followed Trump this month, rather than being his grandfather.
However, Meta’s public affairs director Nkechi Nneji told CBS News that some of these people may have simply forgotten to follow US government accounts.
“Meta doesn’t make anyone follow any account and we never have,” said Nneji.
Credit: Screenshot: Mashable
Former Facebook director of public policy Katie Harbath also weighed in to explain the dates of creation of suspicious accounts, as well as the time period in which users were tracked. It seems that while Meta behaves as if it simply assigns social media accounts to subsequent administrators, it creates entirely new ones. Meta automatically assigns new admin pages the same followers and URL as their predecessors, so it works just as well as if it were the same account.
This means that previous admin accounts can be archived, albeit under a new URL. Therefore, President Biden’s Facebook page and his White House page can still be viewed as they were until Trump’s inauguration this week.
“[M]y team created the first ways to do this when Trump won in 2016 and we had to transfer the official accounts created by President Obama’s team when the Facebook pages were first created,” wrote Harbath in Threads. “The same is done during the transfer. from Trump to Biden. The old ones go to the saved account and the followers remain, but the feed is wiped clean. Many platforms handle it this way.”
Unfortunately, deleting your follow list of unwanted entrants isn’t as easy as going through and unfollowing any accounts you’d rather not see right now. Some users expressed frustration after repeatedly trying to unfollow Trump, only to find themselves following him and not liking themselves.
Stone warns that it may take longer than usual to get out (or in) of Trump’s reviews “as these accounts change hands.” So if you’d rather not see yourself, you’d be more than happy to log off of Facebook and Instagram for a while.
