Meta rejects claims from social media users who say they were forced to follow the Facebook and Instagram accounts of US President Donald Trump, his wife Melania Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
The allegations gained momentum on Tuesday, a day after Trump’s inauguration, with some users saying the platforms, both owned by Meta, made them followers of those accounts without permission.
Pop singer Gracie Abrams said on Instagram that she had to unfollow Trump and Vance’s official pages three times because the platform “automatically kept following them.”
“How strange! I had to block them to make sure I wasn’t anywhere near that far. Let me know if this happens to your accounts too,” she wrote. Others claimed that Meta censors searches for terms like “Democrats” on its platforms by labeling them as sensitive content.
Meta referred CBC News to social media posts by its communications director, Andy Stone.
Stone wrote on Meta’s Threads platform that the confusion was due to the previous administration giving Trump’s team control of the official @POTUS account.
For example, anyone who followed @POTUS during the Biden administration would continue to be a follower even after control of the account is handed over to the new administration.
“People were not forced to automatically follow any of the official Facebook or Instagram accounts of the President, Vice President, or First Lady,” Stone wrote.
Stone did not directly address claims that some users had to repeatedly unfollow these accounts, but said that it “may take some time to process follow and unfollow requests as these accounts change hands.”
Katie Harbath, Facebook’s former director of public policy for global elections, wrote on Threads that a similar transition occurred between Barack Obama and Trump and again between Trump and Joe Biden in 2017.
“The old (Facebook pages) go to an archived account and the followers remain, but the feed is deleted. Most platforms handle it that way,” she said.
There is a growing perception that Big Tech is moving closer to the Trump administration, says Brett Caraway, an associate professor at the University of Toronto, and that the tension already felt by some of the American public is fueled by the presence of Meta-CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other tech executives were aggravated at Trump’s inauguration.
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“With all the concerns about the possibility of authoritarianism entering the United States, one of the first things that typically happens in such a scenario is that an authoritarian government takes control of the means of communication,” Caraway said.
“I think the general distrust and hostility expressed toward the tech industry is pervasive. And it’s not just on the left side. I think it’s right-wing too,” he said.
A July 2024 Gallup poll found that Americans across the political spectrum were equally suspicious of big tech companies; Thirty-two percent of Democrats said they had a lot or a fair amount of confidence in her, followed by 28 percent of independents and 20 percent of Republicans.
The survey was conducted by telephone with a random sample of 1,005 adults and a margin of error of +4 percentage points at a 95 percent confidence level.
Young people in particular have experienced a number of controversies with social media companies, such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal with Facebook and most recently the possible TikTok ban in the US, says Cyrus Beschloss, co-founder of Generation Lab in Washington. which examines young people and their relationship with government, media and technology.
“I think they have some kind of latent, inherent distrust that floats in the ether around them,” Beschloss said.
“My big question is, does it matter? Young people will still use whatever social media platform they choose.”
