Meta addresses user accusations of Trump and Vance auto-follows on Instagram and Facebook

People on Instagram and Facebook noticed they were following President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance after the inauguration on Monday (January 20) - despite claiming they had not been following the pair before this, sparking both confusion and concern.

Some interpreted this as the first sign of the possible power the Trump administration could have over the Meta-owned social media platforms, especially given that Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg was seen in attendance at Trump's inauguration.

Taking to X, formerly Twitter, people aired their concerns about suddenly seeing Trump and Vance on their feeds and following lists.

One person asked: "Why is Instagram making me auto-follow Trump and Vance?"

"MY INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT AUTOMATICALLY STARTED TO FOLLOW DONALD TRUMP WHAT THE ACTUAL F***??" another person wrote.

A third person added: "This is shady. Yesterday Facebook changed my account to follow President Trump, VP Vance, and the White House without my permission. They just auto-subscribed me".

Vice President J.D. Vance and U.S. President Donald Trump watch during an indoor inauguration paradeAnna Moneymaker/Getty Images

"Instagram is making people auto-follow Potus & vp btw!! I just watched it add 100 of my mutuals in a matter of minutes!" a fourth person commented.

Someone else posted: "Why'd it make me automatically follow Trump like I wanted to do that".

However, Meta has since responded to these accusations and said 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.

This also includes the VP and FLOTUS social media accounts too.

After Trump's inauguration, posts from the Biden administration were archived under the username "@potus46archive" which has over 18.7M followers.

This means there are no photos on the POTUS account feed (though the Trump administration has since shared photos on their post inauguration) and the amount of followers remains too.

At the time of writing, the POTUS Instagram account has 19.1M followers and the POTUS Facebook account has 11M followers.

“Just to back up what Andy is saying, my team set up the first ways of having 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 explained on Threads, in response to Stone.

“Same was done during the transfer from Trump to Biden. The old ones go to an archived account and the followers remain, but the feed is wiped clean. Most platforms handle it this way.”

Meanwhile, social media users have also accused Meta of political bias as they highlighted how no results appeared for “#Democrat” or “#Democrats” and a manual search for "Democrats" caused a “results hidden” message to appear.

Though Meta says this has also affected the Republican tag and others, The Independentreported.

Elsewhere, Donald Trump has already made his first blunder as President - and many didn't notice.

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