Many social media users refuted a statement from Meta that official presidential accounts were not automatically followed for its Facebook and Instagram users.
CLEVELAND — Transfer of presidential power in the digital age comes with the transfer of social media accounts, and there’s a lot of confusion about that right now.
THE CLAIM
People have been posting all over social media claiming that Meta has forced users to automatically follow the official Facebook and Instagram accounts for our current President, Vice President and First Lady, but Meta says that’s not true.
SOURCES
To try to VERIFY what’s happening here, our sources are:
- a Meta spokesperson,
- a White House blog post from the Obama administration,
- and personal accounts from people on social media.
EXPLANATION
To better understand what’s happening now, let’s look back at the end of Barack Obama’s presidency in late 2016 and early 2017.
At that time, his administration posted on the White House blog that he was considered the first “social media president” and spelled out how transferring accounts would be handled with the start of donald trump’s first presidency.
The blog explains that official accounts like @POTUS on Instagram would keep their followers, but access would be given to the new incoming President and the posts from the Obama administration would be moved from the official account to a newly created archive account.
That’s what Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said is happening now, with the change from the Joe Biden administration to the new Trump administration.
In a post on Threads, 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. Those accounts are managed by the White House so with a new administration, the content on those Pages changes. This is the same procedure we followed during the last presidential transition. It may take some time for follow and unfollow requests to go through as these accounts change hands.”
But that’s not in line with what people say they’re experiencing on meta social media platforms.
In a reply to Stone’s statement, Threads user Derek Johnson said he was never following the accounts in the first place, but suddenly was after Trump took office again.
Threads user Lisa Dubbels said not only had she never followed official presidential accounts on Facebook or Instagram before, but that she’s had to continuously unfollow and block them this week, suggesting her account was repeatedly forced to follow them despite her taking action not to.
When our national VERIFY team tried to look into this unblocking and re-following as a separate issue, they were directed back to Stone’s initial statement with no explanation for why this is happening.
THE ANSWER
So we actually can’t VERIFY what’s happening here, because there are too many accounts refuting Meta’s official explanation about what’s going on.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Based on posts online, it does appear that these issues are not affecting every Meta user account, but that doesn’t mean it’s not happening to a lot of them.
