Meta is pushing back on claims by 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, the day after Trump took office, as some users said the two platforms, owned by Meta, made them follow those accounts without permission.
Pop singer Gracie Abrams said on Instagram that she had to unfollow the official pages of Trump and Vance three times because the platform “kept following them automatically.”
“How curious! I had to block them to make sure I wasn’t anywhere near that. Share if this happens to your accounts too,” she wrote. Others claimed that Meta was censoring searches for terms like “Democrats” on its platforms by labeling them as sensitive content.
Meta referred CBC News to social media posts written by its communications director, Andy Stone.
Stone, writing on Meta’s Threads, said the confusion was because the previous administration granted control of the official POTUS account to the Trump team.
For example, anyone who was following @POTUS during the Biden administration will remain followed 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 the allegations that some users had to repeatedly unfollow those accounts, but said it “may take some time for follow and unfollow requests to process as these accounts change.”
Katie Harbath, Facebook’s former director of global elections public policy, wrote on Threads that a similar shift occurred between Barack Obama and Trump, and again between Trump and Joe Biden in 2017.
“Old [Facebook pages] Go to an archived account and the followers remain, but the feed is completely erased. She said that most platforms handle the matter this way.
There is a growing perception that big tech companies are closing in on the Trump administration, says Brett Carraway, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, and that the tension already felt by part of the American public has been exacerbated by the presence of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. And other tech executives at Trump’s inauguration.
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“With all the concerns about the possibility of authoritarianism coming to the United States, one of the first things that usually happens in this kind of scenario is that an authoritarian government takes control of communications,” Caraway said.
“I think the general feeling of distrust and hostility directed toward the tech industry is widespread. This is not limited to the left only. I think he’s on the right too.”
Gallup poll from July 2024 Show that Americans across the political spectrum similarly distrust big tech companies; 32 percent of Democrats said they had a lot or a lot of confidence in them, followed by 28 percent of independents and 20 percent of Republicans.
The poll was conducted by telephone with a random sample of 1,005 adults and has a margin of error of +4 percentage points at a 95 percent confidence level.
Young people in particular have lived through a range of controversies involving social media companies, such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal with Facebook and, more recently, the potential ban of TikTok in the United States, says Cyrus Beschloss, co-founder of Generation Lab in Washington. Which studies youth and their relationship with government, media, and technology.
“I think they have this kind of underlying distrust that is floating in the ether around them,” Beschloss said.
“My big question is: Does this matter? Young people are still doing it [use] Whatever social media platform they use.”