Meta pushes back against claims by social media users who say they were forced to follow Facebook and Instagram accounts belonging to US President Donald Trump, his wife Melania Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
The allegations gained momentum Tuesday, a day after Trump took office, with some users saying the platforms, both owned by Meta, were making them followers of the accounts without permission.
Pop singer Gracie Abrams said on Instagram that she had to unfollow Trump and Vance’s official pages three times because the platform “kept auto-following them.”
“How odd! I had to block them to make sure I’m not there. Share in case this happens to your accounts too,” she wrote. Others claimed that Meta was censoring searches for terms like “democrats” on its platforms as sensitive content.
Meta referred CBC News to social media posts from its communications director, Andy Stone.
Stone, writing on Meta’s Threads platform, said the confusion was because the previous administration gave control of the official @POTUS account to Trump’s team.
Anyone who followed @POTUS during the Biden administration, for example, would still be a follower once control of the account was transferred to the new administration.
“People were not required to automatically follow the official Facebook or Instagram accounts of the President, Vice President, or First Lady,” Stone wrote.
Stone did not directly respond to claims that some users had to unfollow these accounts multiple times, but said that “processing follow and unfollow requests may take some time as these accounts change hands “.
Katie Harbath, former public policy director for global elections at Facebook, wrote on Threads that a similar transition occurred between Barack Obama and Trump and then between Trump and Joe Biden in 2017.
“The old man [Facebook pages] go to an archived account and the followers remain, but the feed is cleared. Most platforms do it this way,” she said.
There is a growing sense that Big Tech is getting closer to the Trump administration, says Brett Caraway, an associate professor at the University of Toronto, and that a 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.
Front burner24h34Donald Trump’s billionaire administration
“With all the concerns about the possibility of authoritarianism in the United States, one of the first things that usually happens in this kind of scenario is that an authoritarian government takes control of the means of communication,” Caraway said .
“I think the general feeling of distrust and animosity towards the tech industry is pervasive. And it’s not just on the left. I think it’s also right-wing,” he said.
A Gallup poll from July 2024 showed that Americans across the political spectrum were equally wary of big tech companies; with 32 percent of Democrats saying they have a lot or a fair amount of self-confidence, followed by 28 percent of independents and 20 percent of Republicans.
The survey was conducted by telephone among a random sample of 1,005 adults and with a margin of error of +4 percentage points at a 95 percent confidence level.
Young people in particular have experienced a range of controversies involving social media companies, such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal with Facebook and, more recently, the possible ban of TikTok in the United States, says Cyrus Beschloss, co-founder of Generation Lab in Washington: which studies young people and their relationship with government, media and technology.
“I think they have this sort of latent inherent distrust that floats in the ether around them,” Beschloss said.
“My big question is: does it matter? Young people will continue to [use] regardless of which social media platform they use.
