This week, JD Vance became the Vice President of the United States alongside President Donald Trump. As a result, Vance was given the Instagram handle @VP while Trump took over the @POTUS. However, since taking over the official @VP handle, Vance’s follower count has gone up significantly and swiftly — with many people claiming that they never followed the politician in the first place.
So, what the fuck is going on? Is this the case of former Vice President Kamala Harris‘ account being wiped and replaced with Vance and her followers remaining? Or is Meta somehow orchestrating a mass following of the new VP? Let’s investigate.
As per a statement by Meta spokesperson Andy Stone, the followers who were following the former President and VP accounts were automatically transferred to the new account owner. This also happened during the transfer of the Trump administration to the Biden administration in 2020.
Plus, Andy states that these accounts are completely and totally controlled by the White House.
When you go into the account details of Vance’s VP account, it says it was created in January 2025 and has only ever had one account name. Meanwhile, Harris’ former VP account — which must be archived due to US law — was started in 2021 and notes two profile name changes.
While the followers may have been transferred from the old VP account to the new one, it doesn’t appear to be the exact same account repurposed for the new VP.
Plus, those who actively followed Kamala and now followed Vance noted that they’re still following Kamala.
Although this would explain a big chunk of Vance’s new following, when PEDESTRIAN.TV first started looking into Vance’s following, he was sitting on 12.8 million followers.
An hour later, at the time of writing, his following had grown by a whopping 4.6 million followers. Plus, my personal Instagram account had 112 mutual friends with Vance. An hour later, we had 149 mutuals.
While Vance could be experiencing a surge in followers due to the inauguration spotlight, many users online have speculated that Meta has been forcing users to follow the newly elected politicians.
However, Meta has refuted these claims and claimed to never enact an auto-follow function.
The auto-following claims come after meta users alleged that they were unable to search for certain words such as #democrat on the app after the inauguration.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said this was an issue affecting a range of hashtags, not just politically left-leaning ones. The issue has since been resolved.
So, is this evidence of some sneaky antics? Right now, it’s impossible to know for sure. What is certain is that the new administration has seen more scepticism across digital platforms like TikTok and Meta, especially with the big dogs of the online world ditching fact-checking.
PEDESTRIAN.TV reached out to Meta — the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads — for a comment and was directed to Andy Stone’s statement.
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