Meta has moved swiftly to debunk claims that people were forced to follow MAGA figures like President Donald Trump and his right hand man JD Vance on Meta platforms Facebook and Instagram.
Social media users voiced concern on Meta sites and Elon Musk’s X after it appeared they had mysteriously followed the President, Vice President and first lady Melania Trump after Monday’s inauguration.
Even Democratic Congressman Eric Sorensen was confused by the switchover. He wrote Tuesday: “This morning, @facebook starting serving me all kinds of right wing stuff in my feed. When I went to manage content preferences, I see they automatically made me follow Trump yesterday. Am I the only one?”
Instagram users doubled down on claims of interference after some found that left-leaning searches were apparently roadblocked.
The word ‘Democrat’ and even searches for Democratic political figures like Bernie Sanders were met with a message, stating: “We’ve hidden these results. Results for the term you’ve searched may contain sensitive content.”
The Daily Mail reported that searches for terms including ‘#voteblue’, ‘#obama’, ‘#biden’, and ‘#democrats’ showed up no results throughout Monday and Tuesday.
However, Meta’s communications director Andy Stone said in a post on Threads that both ‘#conservative’ and ‘#republicans’ were blocked, too. “There’s an issue affecting people’s ability to search for a number of different hashtags on Instagram—not just those on the left. We’re working quickly to resolve this,” he said.
The fact that Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg has recently cosied up to Trump despite a tumultuous past compounded the issue for many people. However, his company reassured users that this was all standard procedure.
And there was a simple explanation for people’s follow lists taking on a decidedly MAGA bent, too. That’s because the official president, vice president, and first lady accounts never personally belonged to Trump, Vance and Melania, but had always been liable to change hands when the administration changed.
That means the White House-controlled accounts recently switched from Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Jill Biden’s hands into those of figures that some Democrats would not usually entertain.
In a post on Threads, Mr. Stone explained how the same was true over on Facebook. He said: “The Facebook.com/POTUS and Facebook.com/WhiteHouse accounts are managed by the White House and they change when the occupant of the White House changes.”
Katie Harbath, Facebook’s former election boss who created the process, confirmed there was nothing untoward afoot.
“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,” she said on Threads. “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.”
She complained in a separate post that there is “no winning” with this process. Harbath wrote: “Trust me. We would get flack if we did it the other way too. Really no winning. I think the answer would be more communication to page followers in the days leading up to the switch and after so they could have the choice, but even that is challenging as many don’t necessarily read those.”
