Meta, the parent company of social media giants Instagram and Facebook, is denying claims that users are being made to follow the president without consent.
Following Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s sudden favorable stance toward President Donald Trump, some users allege that their accounts followed those of Trump and Vice President JD Vance without any input from the owner.
Distill Social, a Michigan-based grassroots organization, took to X with their claim:
Facebook is forcing accounts to follow Donald Trump – users have been reporting.
Their latest move reeks of desperation—forcing users to follow Trump is a blatant violation of user autonomy. Zuckerberg’s pandering to political power undermines the very essence of free choice on… pic.twitter.com/pJ0S2zqfPH
— Distill Social (@DistillSocial) January 20, 2025
“Facebook is forcing accounts to follow Donald Trump – users have been reporting,” they wrote. “Their latest move reeks of desperation—forcing users to follow Trump is a blatant violation of user autonomy. Zuckerberg’s pandering to political power undermines the very essence of free choice on social media.”
A couple of people commented to back up the post, saying it has happened to them:
And you can’t unfollow. Tried unfollowing, force quit the app and restarted and I’m still following them
— andykirkbride.bsky.social (@andykirkbride) January 21, 2025
I just unfollowed him when I never followed him to begin with. I actually blocked him then still saw his stuff and then unfollowed also. Hopefully that will work. Downloading stuff so I can delete the app though so guess it won’t matter soon. pic.twitter.com/iiqyzn3fNk
— Tay (@Tay_ladida) January 20, 2025
However, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone is denying that the company is “forcing” people to follow Trump, pointing out that official government accounts can change when new people take office.
The https://t.co/LunllS6D3s and https://t.co/ablkLiXAjw accounts are managed by the White House and they change when the occupant of the White House changes. https://t.co/w2cnzz28Gd
— Andy Stone (@andymstone) January 20, 2025
“The [POTUS] and [WhiteHouse] accounts are managed by the White House and they change when the occupant of the White House changes,” he wrote in a response post.
Former Facebook employee Katie Harbath explained the same thing in an Instagram post, pointing out that this system has been in place since Trump’s first term.
View this post on Instagram
“I’m seeing some folks upset that they are still following the White House and POTUS and the official VPOTUS and other accounts on a bunch of the other social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, X, all that jazz,” she says. “I thought I’d come and share a little nuance on this and some standard operating procedure because my team came up with how to do this along with other platforms when Trump won the first time and we had to transfer- Obama was the first one to create official Facebook pages.”
“It was decided that the content of the old administration would be archived to an archival page,” she continued, filling users in on the process. “So you’ll find like White House 44, 45, etcetera. But the followers would stay under the assumption that people were following the institution and the official account regardless of who was in office.”
Harbath adds that this is totally normal and “nothing political.”
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