On Tuesday, President Donald J. The day after Trump’s inauguration, many Instagram and Facebook users found themselves following him on their social media apps even though they hadn’t signed up to do so.
What gives?
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, said It was part of a routine process in which White House social media accounts are handed over when a new president takes office. It added that there were other bugs in the process that could have pushed the shifting gears.
Let’s walk through what happened.
Why am I following Donald Trump, Melania Trump and JD Vance on Instagram and Facebook?
Just as the federal government must deal with the transfer of power between administrations, Meta must also deal with it.
For years, companies like Meta and X — formerly known as Facebook and Twitter, respectively — have had to manage social media accounts held by the president’s office as they change hands after elections. It grew after Barack Obama took office in 2008 and fully embraced social media to gain support from voters digitally. By 2016, organizations will need to determine how to hand those accounts over into administration.
Meta and X have decided that the official POTUS, VP and First Lady accounts on Facebook, Instagram and X will be switched to the new administration while retaining existing followers of those accounts. This means that if you followed President Obama in 2016, you can automatically follow President Trump in 2017 when he takes office in his first administration. Mr Obama’s posts were archived under a different handle, while Mr Trump’s account was not reset with one. Mr. Obama’s old post attached.
That transition happened again in 2020, when Joseph R. Biden Jr. was elected and took over the official presidential account. On Monday, after Mr. Trump was sworn in, the switch happened again. That’s why you can now see his posts in your feed.
But I swear I wasn’t following any presidential accounts before.
Plenty of people said this week that they had never followed either Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump before and were convinced they had been added as followers against their will.
Meta said it is not forcing people to follow Mr Trump.
“People aren’t automatically made to follow an official Facebook or Instagram account for the president, vice president or first lady,” said Meta spokesperson Andy Stone. statement on the thread. “These accounts are managed by the White House so with a new administration, the content of those pages changes.”
One possible explanation: Four years between administrations is a long time and people may forget which accounts they signed up to follow
When I try to unfollow these accounts, the apps won’t let me What news is that?
It’s not you here, it’s meta.
The company said it “may take some time to follow up and process follow-up requests” as account transfers occur. It is possible that the company has received so many unfollow requests during the transition that it is running into errors while processing them.
Meta claims that this will be resolved soon, but refuses to elaborate on why this is happening.
Why am I seeing recommendations to follow President Trump and Vice President Vance’s accounts?
This is another example of massive changes to meet.
The company previously emphasized that users do not want to see political content across its apps and has removed such content from Facebook, Instagram and Threads. This means posts and accounts related to politicians and controversial social issues are seen less by people It was Meta’s way of making its platform look a bit nicer.
But this year, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, did an about-face and began reinserting political content into people’s feeds. He and others on Meta said they’ve heard people want to see political content again. This shift was part of a larger shift to spread more types of posts and content across its platforms in the Trump era.
You can change Your settings See less political posts on Facebook and Instagram.
I also see people talking about censoring Democrats on social media. What about that?
Add this to the list of major screw-ups.
On Tuesday, people started noticing that they couldn’t search for posts that included the hashtag “#democrats” in some of Meta’s apps. That, along with the new Trump administration and Mr. Zuckerberg’s recent embrace of Mr. Trump, has led people to believe that the company has forced posts by Democrats from its app.
Not true, says Meta, adding that it has created an unfortunate error that it is working quickly to fix. Mr. Stone said Due to the error, users were unable to search for various topics and the error was affecting “not on the left side only”.
