- Meta said it’s not secretly adding its users to President Donald Trump’s followers list.
- People on Instagram and Facebook have said that they found themselves following Trump without intending to do so.
- Meta said follow and unfollow requests may take time to reset as the official accounts change hands to new administrators.
Meta has responded to users who say they found themselves automatically following President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and First Lady Melania Trump shortly after Trump’s inauguration on Monday.
In a Wednesday statement on Threads, Meta’s communication director, Andy Stone, wrote: “People were not made to automatically follow any of the official Facebook or Instagram accounts for the President, Vice President or First Lady.”
He added that the content on the accounts managed by the White House changes with every new administration, a procedure that Meta followed during the last presidential transition.
“It may take some time for follow and unfollow requests to go through as these accounts change hands,” Stone added.
This comes after users complained on platforms like Instagram and Threads that their accounts started following the @POTUS, @VPOTUS, and @FLOTUS accounts without any action on their part. Some also said that unfollowing the accounts has not worked.
One Threads user wrote in a Wednesday post: “So Meta, you wanna explain to me how I wasn’t following T or JD this morning but now I am, and it sure as hell isn’t because I clicked the follow button?”
These complaints about Meta’s systems come after the company made changes to its processes and policies in recent weeks, like removing third-party fact-checkers and rolling back its DEI initiatives.
On January 6, the company also added Dana White, UFC chief and longtime Trump ally, to its board of directors.
Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg was also one of several major business leaders invited to the Trump inauguration.
Representatives for Meta did not respond to a request from Business Insider sent outside regular business hours.
