Celebrities

Gracie Abrams and Demi Lovato hit out at Meta after claiming Instagram auto-followed Donald Trump

Gracie Abrams and Demi Lovato hit out at Meta after claiming Instagram auto-followed Donald Trump
Social Media Users Accuse Meta Of Auto-Following Trump & Vance
unbranded - Newsworthy / VideoElephant

Celebrities such as Gracie Abrams and Demi Lovato have hit out at Meta for not allowing them to unfollow the Instagram accounts of President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.

Taking to her Instagram Story, Abrams shared with her 4.5m followers on the social media platform that she "had to unfollow @vp and @potus three separate times today because @meta kept automatically refollowing the accounts”.

“How curious!” the 'That's So True' singer added. “Had to block them in order to make sure I am nowhere near that. Sharing in case this is happening to your account as well.”

Instagram/gracieabrams

Meanwhile, another popstar Demi Lovato similarly called out Meta after she noticed (and shared a screenshot) that she was following Vice President JD Vance.

"I have unfollowed this guy twice today,” she wrote. "Shady f***ing business Meta".

Instagram/ddlovato

Both Abrams and Lovato are not alone. Many people on these apps have noticed and expressed concern that they were following Trump and Vance after the inauguration on Monday (January 20) even though they say they had not been following them beforehand.

Between this and Meta, Mark Zuckerberg's attendance at the inauguration sparked concern as to the possible power the Trump administration could have over the Meta-owned social media platforms.

Since these accusations have been going viral, Meta has responded by saying that this is a normal administrative occurrence when there is a transfer of power from the outgoing over to the incoming administration.

"A reminder: the Facebook.com/POTUS and Facebook.com/White… accounts are managed by the White House. They change when the occupant of the White House changes," Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a Threads post.

Posts from the Biden administration were archived under the username "@potus46archive," which has over 18.7M followers. The number of followers remains on the POTUS account as well.

Elsewhere, Meta has also come under fire with accusations of political bias as users spotted how no results appeared for “#Democrat” or “#Democrats” and a manual search for "Democrats" caused a “results hidden” message to appear. Though the social media company says this issue has also affected other hashtags, including a Republican tag as per The Independent.

In other news, Donald Trump reveals who he'd 'like' to buy TikTok amid Elon Musk rumours.

How to join the indy100's free WhatsApp channel

Sign up to our free indy100 weekly newsletter

Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

The Conversation (0)