Meta Denies Users’ Claims That It’s Forcing Them to Follow POTUS Account

The new administration has brought with it new social media conspiracy theories.

Facebook and Instagram users in the U.S. claimed that they were being forced to follow President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance‘s accounts, while TikTok users hinted at an unwelcome change in the application’s algorithm.

Among the Facebook and Instagram users complaining about the forced follows included singer Gracie Abrams, who said in an Instagram Story that she had to unfollow the @potus and @vp accounts three separate times, CNN reported. Fellow singer Demi Lovato also noted in her Instagram Story, “I have unfollowed this guy twice today.”

According to The Hill, many users who claimed that they were forced to follow the accounts had not previously been following former President Joe Biden or former Vice President Kamala Harris, so it was not a case of the accounts changing hands.

Katie Harbath, who was Facebook’s public policy director for global elections from 2011 through 2021, told CBS News that her team followed the same protocols through administration transitions in 2017 and 2021, giving each incoming president a clean slate on the platform.

“That would give them the opportunity to set up the page how they want, make sure it’s got the cover photo, all that jazz,” she added. “Then it was decided that under the assumption that people are following the institution—regardless of who’s in it—that the followers would be mirrored over, copied over to the new page.”

Meta communications director Andy Stone denied the allegations in a post on X, writing, “People were not made to automatically follow any of the official Facebook or Instagram accounts for the president, vice president, or first lady. Those accounts are managed by the White House, so with a new administration, the content on those pages changes. This is the same procedure we followed during the last presidential transition. It may take some time for follow and unfollow requests to go through as these accounts change hands.”

Some Instagram users also claimed that the #Democrat hashtag was blocked on Instagram this week, CNN reported. Stone replied on X, “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.”

Recent actions by Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg likely contributed to the speculation, including meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, donating $1 million Trump’s inauguration fund, promoting Republican Party ally Joel Kaplan to chief global affairs officer, adding UFC CEO and Trump ally Dana White to Meta’s board of directors, eliminating third-party fact-checking, and scaling back diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

As for TikTok, Semafor reported that following the app’s approximately 14-hour shutdown this past weekend, many creators began to post videos alleging that the algorithm felt different, with some claiming that their comments, feeds, and search functions were being censored.

Semafor reported that many of those videos had tallied millions of likes. A spokesperson for TikTok told Semafor, “Our policies and algorithms did not change over the weekend.”

Much like Zuckerberg, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew has been perceived as seeking to curry favor with the Trump administration. Last week, he posted a video praising the then-president-elect after the Supreme Court upheld a law that would force a ban of the app in the U.S. He also met with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla., last month, and attended Monday’s inauguration.