Facebook users say they’re auto-following President Donald Trump and White House pages after the inauguration of the 47th president amid the rightward turn of Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg.
“Never once have I followed any Trump or White House pages. My feed is now filled with the official posts,” one Reddit user wrote in the Facebook subreddit.
“All of a sudden I was following Donald and his wife on fb. Everyone check your page because a few people are saying the same thing and I sure as hell have never looked at their pages. Hoping I took care of that problem,” another user wrote on Facebook.
On the Millenials subreddit, user Piper_Dear wrote, “Facebook made my profile auto-follow Trump.” The user added that they were unable to unfollow the pages.
However, in some cases, users may be talking about the POTUS account, which updates to the new president following the inauguration, not Trump’s personal account. This means that if you were following the POTUS account under Biden, that account has now been transferred to Trump, which is also true for the accounts for the vice president and first lady.
This comes as Meta said it was working to resolve an issue with Instagram that meant that users got a “results hidden” message when they searched for terms related to the Democrats.
Users across social media have accused Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, of political bias, pointing to the fact that the issue came up following Trump’s inauguration on Monday. Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg attended the inauguration and some surrounding events.
Meta has argued that it’s a technical problem that has affected other hashtags, including a Republican tag.
Social media expert Matt Navarra told the BBC that the incident was still “embarrassing” for Instagram.
“In a hyper-partisan environment, even unintentional errors like this can escalate into accusations of partisanship,” he told the outlet. “If these issues are not resolved quickly they risk fuelling conspiracy theories and damaging Meta’s reputation.”
Users who searched for “#Democrat” or “#Democrats” previously saw no results, while the hashtag “Republicans” had millions of posts.
If users manually searched for “Democrats” instead of clicking on a hashtag, they were shown a screen stating, “We’ve hidden these results.”
"Results for the term you searched for may contain sensitive content,” it stated.
“We’re aware of an error affecting hashtags across the political spectrum and we are working quickly to resolve it,” Meta told the BBC.
When reached for comment, Meta referred The Independent to posts on the app Threads by Andy Stone, who reminded users that the POTUS and White House accounts “are managed by the White House. They change when the occupant of the White House changes.”
“There’s an issue affecting people’s ability to search for a number of different hashtags on Instagram - not just those on the left. We’re working quickly to resolve this,” he added.
Zuckerberg’s attendance at Trump’s second inauguration was just one of a number of recent moves appearing to be part of an effort to get in the president’s good graces.
Other tech leaders, such as Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon, have also taken steps to ingratiate themselves with Trump.
Earlier this month, Zuckerberg announced significant changes to Meta’s fact-checking and moderation efforts, pointing to the “cultural tipping point” that was Trump’s election victory.
Republican Joel Kaplan has been selected as the new global affairs chief for Meta, replacing former U.K. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg.
Meta donated to Trump’s inaugural fund, and Zuckerberg also made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago in November to meet with Trump, who, along with his allies, has previously slammed Meta and its platforms, claiming censorship and threatened Zuckerberg with time behind bars.
