Hours after Donald Trump was sworn in as president on Monday, some Instagram and Facebook users started noticing that their accounts were suddenly following Pages associated with the new president, First Lady Melania Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
The official POTUS and White House Facebook Pages are owned and controlled by the current administration, so it’s possible that some Facebook users were already following those accounts while Joe Biden was in office and did not opt to unfollow once they were transferred to the new Trump administration. But a number of users, who’ve taken to Reddit to complain about their new unwanted follows, claim they never elected to follow those official pages before. Others noted that some of the pages they’re following — like this one for Vance — appear to have been created in early January 2025 while the page for Harris is now marked as “archived.”
Credit: Katie Mather/Yahoo News
Reddit users also noted on Tuesday that when they searched for hashtags like “#democrats,” “#berniesanders” and “#joebiden” on Instagram they received a pop-up message saying the results have been hidden due to “sensitive content,” while searches for #donaldtrump” and “#republicans” did not trigger a similar flag.
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Yahoo News corroborated these results when searching for the same political hashtags on Instagram Tuesday morning. However, as of Tuesday afternoon, the Democrat-related terms were no longer hidden.
Credit: Nicole Darrah/Yahoo News
Facebook Communications Director Andy Stone responded to the complaints in a post on Threads Tuesday, which acknowledged that there was “an issue affecting people’s ability to search for a number of different hashtags on Instagram — not just those on the left.”
Stone also addressed complaints from those who said they were now following official Trump administration Facebook pages, explaining that the Pages “change when the occupant of the White House changes.” However he did not offer an explanation for those who insist they were never previously following any of these political accounts.
Facebook, Instagram and Threads are all owned by Meta, the social media conglomerate run by Mark Zuckerberg.
According to Meta’s Terms of Service, which was updated this month, users who join the platforms agree that Meta will use data to “make suggestions” about “groups to join, events to attend [and] Facebook Pages to follow.” The Terms do not say whether Meta has the right to make users “like” certain Pages or follow accounts without consent. Meta has not responded to requests from Yahoo News to confirm whether the company’s policy permits this kind of activity.
This is not the first time Meta users have complained about the political content on its platforms. In April 2024, Instagram faced backlash from users after it implemented an automatic filter against political content in people’s feeds. Months later, Trump accused Meta and Google of censoring content about him in “another attempt at RIGGING THE ELECTION.”
But Trump’s relationship with Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who was among the tech executives seated in the front row at his inauguration on Monday, has seen a notable shift in recent months, following Trump’s election in November.
In early January, Zuckerberg announced Meta would be ending its partnerships with independent fact-checkers because he claimed the groups were too politically biased. Then, he revealed a plan to kill the company’s diversity initiatives, in line with Trump’s plans to sign an order ending diversity, equity and inclusion programs. He has also recently assembled a new leadership team with advisers like Joel Kaplan, who has ties to the Republican Party.
