Following President Trump’s inauguration Monday, many users on Facebook and Instagram complained about receiving notifications alerting them that they were now following the accounts of Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, first lady Melania Trump, and/or the White House.
Amidst political division and in the wake of Meta’s recent changes -- including its decision to end fact-checking and enforce Community Notes as its main form of content moderation -- many users on Facebook and Instagram were triggered by notifications that claimed they were now following Trump and his political circle.
advertisement
advertisement
Meta has denied the claims, with spokesperson Andy Stone stating in a Threads post that “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,” Stone explained. “This is the same procedure we followed during the last presidential transition.”
However, some Facebook and Instagram users continue to say they are unable to successfully unfollow these now-Republican accounts.
On Tuesday, for example, Demi Lovato -- who has 154 million followers on Instagram -- shared a screenshot of her following Vance’s account, although she said she had already tried to unfollow it twice.
Singer-songwriter Gracie Abrams also said she had tried to "unfollow" the accounts three different times and was eventually forced to block the accounts to make sure she was not following them anymore.
Other users have stated that the results for the #democrat hashtag weren’t showing up on Monday. Then, on early Tuesday, users trying to access results for the hashtag received a message that read" “Results for the term you searched for may contain sensitive content.”
Meta has since admitted that some users are indeed having issues unfollowing these accounts, with Stone saying, “It may take some time for follow and unfollow requests to go through as these accounts change hands.”