If your Facebook account seems to have started following President Donald Trump on its own this week, you’re not alone. However, Meta insists that this is not as suspicious as it may seem and is actually a result of standard procedures.
Users of Facebook and Instagram have accused Meta of artificially inflating Trump’s follower count by making people follow him after Monday’s inauguration. The controversy arose when many users discovered that their accounts were following the president without their consent.
As of now, both the POTUS and White House Facebook pages each have 11 million followers.
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Skepticism from users is understandable. Meta has recently shown support for Trump, implementing various policy changes to align with the new administration’s agenda and gain favor with the president. Trump, in turn, has shown interest in the number of people engaging with his social media content, even postponing the U.S. ban on TikTok due to the popularity of his videos.
Given Trump’s executive orders and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s shifts in policy, it’s evident that the usual protocols no longer apply. Nevertheless, Meta insists that the situation is not what it seems.
Why is my Facebook account following Trump?
Addressing the issue on both Threads and X, Meta’s communication director Andy Stone clarified that the tech company is not compelling Facebook and Instagram users to automatically follow President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, or First Lady Melania Trump. Instead, the official White House accounts have been transitioned to the new administration.
“Those accounts are run by the White House, so with a new administration, the content on those Pages changes,” Stone explained. “This is the same process we followed during the last presidential transition.”
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Therefore, individuals who had previously followed former President Joe Biden, former Vice President Kamala Harris, or former First Lady Jill Biden would now find themselves following the equivalent Trump administration accounts for each role.
Not everyone is satisfied with Meta’s explanation. Some claim that they had never followed any political accounts yet were made to follow Trump by Facebook. Others point out that the new Trump administration accounts were just created this month. Some mention that their history indicates they only followed Trump this month and were not grandfathered in.
Nonetheless, Meta’s public affairs director Nkechi Nneji told CBS News that some users may have simply forgotten that they followed U.S. government accounts.
“Meta does not force anyone to follow any account, and we never have,” Nneji affirmed.
Credit: Screenshot: Mashable
Former Facebook public policy director Katie Harbath clarified the suspicious creation dates of the accounts and the timing of users’ follows. It appears that while Meta transitions social media accounts to the new administration, they technically create entirely new accounts. Nevertheless, Meta gives the new administration’s pages the same followers and URL as their predecessors, making it appear as if it were the same account.
This allows the previous administration’s accounts to be archived under a new URL. Therefore, Biden’s presidential Facebook page and his White House page can still be accessed as they were before Trump’s inauguration this week.
“[M]y team established the initial process back in 2016 when Trump won, and we had to transfer the official accounts created by President Obama’s team when Facebook pages were first launched,” Harbath explained on Threads. “The same procedure was followed during the transition from Trump to Biden. The old accounts move to an archived account, the followers remain, but the feed is cleared. Most platforms handle it this way.”
Unfortunately, ridding your follow list of undesirable accounts is not as simple as unfollowing them. Some users have expressed frustration after attempting to unfollow Trump, only to find themselves following him again involuntarily.
Stone advises that it might take longer than usual to opt out of (or into) Trump’s updates “as these accounts change hands.” Therefore, if you prefer not to see them, you might want to take a break from Facebook and Instagram for a while.
