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Liberal Facebook and Instagram users freaked out when they realized that they were automatically following President Donald Trump’s and Vice President JD Vance’s accounts after the inauguration — wrongly claiming the platforms were forcing Americans to follow the profiles as “part of the propaganda machine.”
The lefty account holders were left dumbfounded when posts from the country’s newly sworn-in leaders appeared on their feeds despite never hitting follow for either Trump or Vance.
Some alarmists believed that the supposed auto-follow was the Trump Administration’s first step towards revoking autonomy on Meta-owned social media platforms. Much of the anxiety was fueled by the presence of multiple social media heads sitting front and center at Trump’s inauguration — including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“wait did facebook auto follow all of the new admin for americans?? i did not follow any of these pages i barely even use facebook but they were all at the top of my feed, and when i clicked through it said i followed them??” one user wrote on X.
“Not only is Instagram forcing accounts to auto-follow the VP, but they essentially bought or stole Kamala’s entire follow list. They have the exact same amount of followers and all of the same people I follow, follow both accounts. People I know don’t want to follow him,” another added.
“Believe it or not, I realize today that I was following an account I never followed at all. The automatic follow is part of the propaganda machine social media has become. I will have to check on a daily basis on a ridiculous (un)following battle I don’t want to be a part of,” a third user wrote.
But the panicked social media users were simply following the official US government accounts — which switch over every time a new administration is in the White House as others pointed out in an attempt to quell the growing alarm.
“Not to say Meta is above doing sketchy stuff but this wasn’t an ‘auto follow’ in that sense, the official VP insta switched from Harris to Vance, retaining current followers. The POTUS account also switched over but I guess Vance is just a particularly jarring face to see pop up,” one X user wrote.
The official government accounts — including the POTUS, vice president, and first lady social media profiles — are all managed by the White House and whichever administration is in office.
The accounts always “change when the occupant of the White House changes,” Meta spokesman Andy Stone explained in a Threads post.
Following the inauguration, all posts from the prior administration are archived, making it seem like the account is starting fresh. However, the account itself isn’t deleted, it’s the same account, so the followers stay the same.
As of Tuesday morning, former President Joe Biden’s archived POTUS account on Facebook had 11 million followers, which matched Trump’s new POTUS account on the platform.
As a result, many supporters of the Biden Administration found themselves following Trump on Monday without intending to.
Every user can freely choose whether to continue following or unfollow the accounts by clicking the ellipsis on the profile page and clicking “unfollow.”
With Post wires
