Monday’s presidential inauguration may have demonstrated a peaceful transfer of power from Joe Biden to Donald Trump, but the social media transition hasn’t been quite so smooth. This week, many users on Meta properties Instagram and Facebook were alarmed to notice they appeared to be following Trump’s account, as well as Vice President JD Vance and first lady Melania Trump, without having manually followed the feeds. When some users unfollowed or blocked the accounts, they found that within a few hours they were following the new administration’s handles again.
“I had to block that Level 5 clinger 3 different times yesterday,” one reddit user wrote of Vance’s account.
When contacted by Vanity Fair, a Meta spokesperson pointed to a statement published by Andy Stone, a spokesperson at Threads, another Meta platform.
“People were not made to automatically follow any of the official Facebook or Instagram accounts for the President, Vice President, or First Lady,” the statement reads. “Those accounts are managed by the White House so with a new administration, the content on those Pages changes. 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.”
Essentially, if you were already following the @POTUS or @VicePresident handles, you’re still following them, they’re just under new management. Users who were already following the account, however, did auto-follow an additional account: @potus46archive, which archives the past administration’s content and comments, allowing the new president a clean slate while preserving such articles of history as Joe and Jill Biden’s final White House selfie for good measure.
Not even Dogstagram was spared. As one Reddit user wrote: “I absolutely didn’t follow the previous president or VP on my dog’s instagram account. I only follow other dogs and two local stores that love him and have shared pictures of him when he comes in.” The user said they unfollowed those accounts from his dog’s IG handle.
Meta did not offer comment on those users, like the above pup’s human, who insisted, paw to god, that they had not been following the accounts before, and had been unknowingly subscribed.
Katie Harbath, the former head of public policy at Meta (then Facebook), seconded Stone’s explanation of the general process of the digital changing of the guard in her own Threads post. “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 wrote. “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.”
Users have also reported seeing increased content from Trump and Friends in their feeds as suggested accounts. The party line? That’s algorithms for ya, baby! Users who interact with political content may be more likely to be presented with political content in flavors they didn’t ask for. Then why are there reports of extremely not-Democrat content when people search the word “Democrat,” and in some reported instances, no search results for the keyword at all? In another Threads post, Stone waved vaguely at “an issue.”
“There’s an issue affecting people’s ability to search for a number of different hashtags on Instagram—not just those on the left,” he wrote. “We’re working quickly to resolve this.”
When contacted by Vanity Fair Thursday, Meta declined to further comment on whether the issue had been resolved, or what had caused it.
Did that issue perhaps donate a million dollars to Trump’s inauguration fund and sit onstage while 47 was sworn in? Was that issue played by Jesse Eisenberg in The Social Network? You don’t have to name names, just yes-or-no answers would work. Does that issue rhyme with Shmark Schmuckerberg is schmucking schmup to Shrump?
Not to get too in the weeds, but there’s a dog on Instagram who wants to know.