Several users of Meta platforms have flagged that their accounts automatically started re-following the official White House accounts for the newly elected United States President Donald Trump, and Vice President JD Vance, even after they unfollowed the same once the new administration took office on January 20, according to a Reuters report.
Various posts on social media reported the aberration. They added that the event occurred despite users unfollowing the official accounts more than once or even blocking them.
White House social media accounts are transferred from the outgoing to the incoming administration after every presidential election. The same occurred in both 2017, when Donald Trump succeeded Barack Obama as the President, and in 2021, when Biden became the 46th US President after Trump.
Why it Matters
The peculiar occurrence was not limited to those who unfollowed the official accounts following Trump’s inauguration, but also those who had never followed them to begin with.
Andy Stone, Meta’s Communications Director, noted on X that “People were not made to automatically follow any of the official Facebook or Instagram accounts for the President, Vice President or First Lady”. He further added that the accounts were managed by the White House and that with the new administration coming in, the content there would change as well.
“This is the same procedure we followed during the last presidential transition. It may take some time for follow and unfollow requests to go through as these accounts change hands” he also stated.
Many users, however, were not convinced.
“NOT TRUE. I never followed the official POTUS account on Instagram. It now shows as being followed. This was done automatically, without any kind of consent. It even shows up as the account I most recently followed. WHAT THE ACTUAL F??” a user on X said in response to Stones’ tweet.
“Sorry but I went out of my way to check in the AM and was not following those accounts. By late afternoon I was. How can you explain that? Heard others unfollowing multiple times ….”, said another.
A Persistently Shifty Stance
This comes shortly after Meta suspended its third-party fact-checking program, and said it was relaxing its content moderation when it comes to political speech, on January 7. Company CEO Mark Zuckerberg observed that the platform was going to relax its hold on hot-button topics such as immigration, gender identity and more. Meta’s content moderation systems had grown too complex, censoring harmless content and impeding free speech in the process, he added.
Zuckerberg further reacted to the 2024 Presidential Elections as a “cultural tipping point,” and Meta subsequently shifted its Trust and Safety teams from California to Texas.
This is not the first time users have noticed and flagged abrupt changes in its services brought about by Meta. Back in 2015, Facebook launched a campaign for its own version of Net Neutrality —Internet.org—except it placed ads in between people’s timelines on their mobile applications. While Internet.org was visualised to provide free mobile access to a limited number of online services in developing countries and eventually make the internet more accessible, critics noted that it involved planned to collect user data whenever users would install, run or use any of Internet.org services.
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