Is the government now trying to control who you follow and what you see on social media? That's what a number of Meta users are thinking after people started to notice that they were suddenly following Donald Trump and JD Vance on Facebook and Instagram after the inauguration without actively choosing to follow them.
Meta responded to users' outrage claiming that the automatic switch is part of a long-standing process tied to official U.S. government accounts. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone explained the situation in a Threads post. Apparently official U.S. government accounts like @POTUS (President of the United States) and @VP (Vice President) are managed by the White House. When a new administration takes office, these accounts are transferred to reflect the new leadership.
"The official POTUS and White House accounts change when the occupant of the White House changes," Stone said. The same process applies to the vice president and first lady's official accounts.
For example, when Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th president of the United States, the official social media accounts previously linked to Joe Biden's administration were archived. Followers of Biden's POTUS accounts were automatically moved to the accounts now associated with Trump and his administration.
This may explain that occurrence, but may are still sideying the tech company after Instagram users discovered that searching for hashtags like "#Democrat" and "#Democrats" returned a "results hidden" message, while the hashtag "#Republican" displayed 3.3 million posts.
Because of this, many are accusing Meta of political bias, especially as the issue surfaced shortly after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attended President Donald Trump's inauguration.
Meta is saying that this whole thing was a technical glitch that also affects other hashtags, including Republican ones. They released a statement, saying, "We're aware of an error affecting hashtags across the political spectrum and we are working quickly to resolve it."
The timing of the glitch paired with Zuckerberg's recent donation and interactions with the Trump administration paired with Meta's changes to its fact checking content moderation have many questioning the app and it's creator's motives.
