If your Facebook account seems to have autofollowed President Donald Trump this week, you’re not alone. However, Meta claims that this is not as bad as it seems, and is actually 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 arose after some people discovered that their accounts were following the president, despite the fact that they had given no indication that this was something they wanted to do.
As of this writing, the POTUS and White House Facebook pages each have 11 million followers.
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The tweet may have been deleted
It’s not entirely unreasonable for users to be suspicious. Meta has been publicly cozy with Trump recently, enacting numerous policy changes to better align with the new administration’s agenda and curry favor with the president. Trump has also shown that he is in love with the number of people who consume his social media. In fact, the millions of views his videos have garnered on TikTok seemed to have influenced the latest delay in banning the app in the US.
Further, between Trump’s sweeping executive orders and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s policy changes, it’s clear that the typical rules of engagement no longer apply. However, Meta says it 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, stated that the tech giant is not forcing Facebook and Instagram users to automatically follow President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, or the First Lady Melania Trump. Instead, the official social media accounts for the White House have simply been transferred to the new administration.
“These accounts are managed by the White House, so with a new administration, the content on those Pages changes,” Stone said. “This is the same procedure we followed during the last presidential transition.”
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As such, anyone who had followed former President Joe Biden, former Vice President Kamala Harris, or former First Lady Jill Biden would have suddenly found themselves following Trump administration equivalents in each role.
However, not everyone was satisfied with Meta’s explanation. Some claim they didn’t follow any political accounts but were still drafted by Facebook to follow Trump. Others note that the offending Trump administration accounts were just created this month. Some have further stated that their follow history indicated that they would simply follow Trump this month, instead of grandfathering.
However, Meta’s director of public affairs, Nkechi Nneji, told CBS News that some of these people may have simply forgotten that they were following US government accounts.
Meta doesn’t make anyone follow any account and we never have,” said Nneji.
Credit: Screenshot: Mashable
Facebook’s former director of public policy, Katie Harbath, also spoke out to explain the questionable account creation dates, as well as the timing of users being followed. It seems that while Meta acts like it’s just handing over social media accounts to the next administration, they’re technically creating entirely new ones. Meta simply gives the new admin’s pages the same followers and URLs as their predecessor, so it effectively works as if it were the same account.
This means that former administration accounts can be archived, albeit under a new URL. As such, Biden’s presidential Facebook page and his White House page can still be seen 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 that President Obama’s team created when Facebook pages were first created,” Harbath wrote in Threads. “Same thing was done during the transfer. from Trump to Biden. Old ones go to an archived account and followers remain, but the feed is deleted. Most platforms handle it that way.”
Unfortunately, cleaning up your follow list of unwanted intruders isn’t as simple as just going through and unfollowing every account you wouldn’t see now. Some users have expressed frustration after repeatedly trying to unfollow Trump, only to find themselves involuntarily following him once again.
Stone warns that it may take a little longer than usual to opt out of (or on) Trump’s updates “as these accounts change hands.” So if you don’t prefer to see them, you might be happier disconnecting from Facebook and Instagram for a while.