Shortly after Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th president of the United States on Monday, many Facebook users started to report that the social network automatically made them follow Trump’s Facebook page. I’ve seen several threads on this issue on Reddit, social media, and people I know personally have also asked me why Facebook made them follow Trump.
While Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made it very clear that he and his company are making changes to endear Meta to the Republican president, there is a much less nefarious explanation for why people suddenly saw Facebook posts from Trump even though they don’t remember following him. When reached for comment, Facebook Communications Director Andy Stone directed me to his posts on Threads which points out how government social media accounts work and change with the current administration.
The POTUS and White House Facebook pages are owned by the sitting administration. When Trump was sworn into office, those pages started sharing his official portrait, images of him signing a flurry of executive orders, and other images from the inauguration. An archive of the POTUS Facebook page from January 24, 2021, shows that the then incoming Biden administration also held on to all the followers from the first Trump administration. And an archive of the White House Facebook page shows that in both the 2017 and 2021 transitions, the page’s posts were wiped and archived, but its follower count was not. Users who followed those pages during the Biden administration may not know that this is how those official pages are managed, and were surprised to see posts from Trump in their feeds all of a sudden.
I’ve also seen some people claim that Facebook made them follow other Trump-related Facebook pages, like Melania’s Trump’s or the GOP’s pages, but was not able to confirm that happened. Facebook’s Stone told me that the company has seen no evidence of this happening or reason that it would happen.
Fear and confusion about social media companies leaning further to the right as soon as Trump took office reached beyond Facebook yesterday, and are understandable given that some “errors” are impacting Democrats but not Republicans. On Instagram, for example, users found that Instagram was hiding results for the search term “Democrats.” At the time of writing, when I searched for “Democrats” Instagram said it couldn’t find any matching results. When I searched for “Republicans” Instagram had no issue and surfaced many posts. Meta told the BBC in a statement that it’s “aware of an error affecting hashtags across the political spectrum and we are working quickly to resolve it.”
As we’ve reported in recent weeks, it’s obvious that Meta has decided to endear itself to Trump and conservatives, making specific policy changes around how users can talk about gender and immigrants in a way that panders to Trump and his supporters. There are many reasons Meta would pander to the most powerful politician in the world, especially since Zuckerberg has explicitly said he hopes Trump will protect his company from European regulators. However, forcing millions of users to follow Trump does not seem especially beneficial to anyone, and could easily be explained by the fact that many of these users already followed official administration accounts, or just the fact that Facebook is a gigantic platform that is rife with errors.
