Here’s Why Your Facebook Account Automatically Followed Trump

If your Facebook the account appears to have automatically followed President Donald Trump This week, you are not the only one. Anyway, Meta claims that it is not as sinister as it seems and that it is in fact the result of routine operations.

Facebook and Instagram users accused Meta of artificially increasing Trump’s follower count by forcing people to follow him following Monday’s inauguration. The issue was raised after several people discovered their accounts were following THE president although they have given no indication that this is something they would like to do.

At the time of writing, the POTUS And White House The Facebook pages each have 11 million followers.

The tweet may have been deleted

It’s not entirely unreasonable for users to be wary. Meta recently publicly approached Trump, adopt many policy changes to better align with the new administration’s agenda and win the president’s favor. Trump has also been attracted by the number of people who consume his social media. The millions of views his TikTok videos have accumulated even seemed to influence its recent delay in banning the app in the United States.

Furthermore, between Trump’s radical executive orders and CEO of Meta Mark ZuckerbergWith the policy changes, it is clear that the usual rules of engagement no longer apply. However, Meta says that’s not what it looks like.

Why is my Facebook account following Trump?

Fix the problem on both threads and XMeta communications director Andy Stone said the tech giant doesn’t force Facebook and Instagram users to automatically follow President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance or first lady Melania Trump . Rather, the official White House social media accounts were simply transferred to the new administration.

“These accounts are managed by the White House so with a new administration, the content of these pages changes,” said Peter. “This is the same procedure we followed during the last presidential transition.”

Crushable speed of light

So whoever had followed the old President Joe Bidenformer Vice President Kamala Harris or former First Lady Jill Biden would have suddenly found themselves following the Trump administration’s equivalents in each role.

However, not everyone was happy with Meta’s explanation. A few claim that they had not followed any political accounts, but were nevertheless recruited by Facebook to follow Trump. Others note that the Trump administration’s incriminating accounts had just been created this month. A few further stated that their tracking history indicated they had just followed Trump this monthrather than benefiting from acquired rights.

However, Meta public affairs director Nkechi Nneji said CBS News that some of these people may have simply forgotten that they followed the US government accounts.

“Meta does not force anyone to follow an account and we never have,” Nneji said.

Former Facebook public policy director Katie Harbath also weighed in to explain the suspicious creation dates of the accounts, as well as the timing of user tracking. It seems that even though Meta is behaving as if they are simply handing over their social media accounts to the next administration, they are technically creating entirely new ones. Meta simply gives the new administration’s pages the same followers and URL as their predecessor’s, so they effectively function as if they were the same account.

This means that accounts from the old administration can be archived, but under a new URL. As such, Biden’s presidential Facebook page and his The White House page both can still be considered as they were until Trump’s inauguration this week.

“(My) team put the first steps in place to do this when Trump won in 2016 and we had to transfer the official accounts that President Obama’s team had created when the Facebook pages were created,” Harbath wrote on Threads. “The same thing was done when switching from Trump to Biden. Oldies go to an archived account and followers stay, but the feed is wiped. Most platforms handle it that way.”

Unfortunately, clearing your watchlist of unwanted intruders isn’t as simple as going through and unfollowing accounts you’d rather not see at the moment. Some users expressed frustration after trying multiple times unfollow Assetonly to find herself unwittingly following him once again.

Stone warns that it may take a little longer than usual to unsubscribe from (or opt-in to) Trump updates “as these accounts change hands.” So if you prefer not to see them, you may prefer to log out of Facebook and Instagram for a while.