Amid concerns that some of the biggest names in tech are enjoying a cozy relationship with President Donald Trump's White House, Instagram users claimed that its owner, Meta, formerly Facebook, had surreptitiously made them "follow" Trump's and Vice President JD Vance's profiles on the social media platform.
Some users who said they "unfollowed" Trump's and Vance's profiles later reported they were "following" them again, despite explicitly declining their interest.
The Claim
Multiple posts on X, formerly Twitter, claimed Meta had made users follow Trump and Vance on Instagram without their permission.
A post by NurysKMateo, posted on January 21, 2025, viewed 102,000 times, said: "Apparently instagram is automatically following Trump and the VP from peoples accounts without them knowing. Made sure to block them before they tried it with me 😂"
User @MaileonX wrote: "Wtf. Instagram autofollowed my account to JD Vance. I had to unfollow. Knock it off @JDVance
"this is tacky AF. Zuck- you're OFF the rails!!!"
A screengrab of an Instagram "Story" by singer Demi Lovato, shared on X, included a post that said: "uh so apparently meta is following POTUS & VP accounts on random peoples accounts and not letting them unfollow?
"meta is making everyone follow them. it's gone up from 8.9 to 17m in 45 mins. watched it happen, and with people/pages who would never ever follow and just watched my mutual count go up.
"my friends and i have had to unfollow them both multiple times in the last hour.
"it's forcing you to follow them.
"and then resetting you to follow them after a while hoping you won't notice."
The Facts
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's sudden courtship of the Trump administration has sown doubt about the political impartiality of Meta and sparked concern over the influence Trump may now have over the likes of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, which Meta owns.
In what was seen as a pledge of fealty to Trump and conservatives earlier this month, Zuckerberg announced Meta was ending its partnerships with fact-checking services over accusations of "political bias," a claim made without evidence and widely rejected by the fact-checking journalists whom Facebook and Meta made use of.
Subsequently, Zuckerberg joined fellow tech giants Jeff Bezos, Apple's Tim Cook and Google CEO Sundar Pichai among the guests at Trump's presidential inauguration on Monday.
Regardless of this context, the "auto-follow" allegation appears to have been caused by the incoming Republican leadership refreshing the official White House pages for the president and vice president, which happens with each presidential transition.
A spokesperson for Meta directed Newsweek to comments by Meta Communications Officer Andy Stone, who said on Meta's Threads: "A reminder: the Facebook.com/POTUS and Facebook.com/White... accounts are managed by the White House. They change when the occupant of the White House changes."
After investigating claims that users had been resubscribed to Trump's and Vance's pages after unfollowing them, Stone said in a follow-up post: "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."
Former Facebook staffer Katie Harbath responded to one of Stone's posts, saying she had been part of a team that archived the previous administration's pages during transition.
"Just to back up what Andy is saying, my team set up the first ways of having to do this when Trump won in 2016 and we had to transfer the official accounts that President Obama's team created when Facebook pages were first created," Harbath said.
"Same was done during the transfer from Trump to Biden. The old ones go to an archived account and the followers remain, but the feed is wiped clean. Most platforms handle it this way."
As President Barack Obama, referred to as "the first social media president," left office, his administration issued an explanation of what would happen to the official POTUS and other official White House social media accounts. The explanation matches that provided by Meta.
"On Instagram and Facebook, the incoming White House will gain access to the White House username, URL, and retain the followers, but will start with no content on the timeline," it stated.
"An archive of White House content that was posted to the Obama White House Instagram and Facebook will continue to be accessible to the public at Instagram.com/ObamaWhiteHouse and Facebook.com/ObamaWhiteHouse.
"Facebook accounts for President Obama and the Vice President and the Instagram accounts belonging to the First Lady and Vice President will be moved to new "44" usernames and preserved by NARA."
Archives of former President Joe Biden's and Vice President Kamala Harris' Instagram pages have already been made. They are now under National Archives and Records Administration maintenance. Harris' archive showed she had 16.9 million people following the vice president's account, whereas Vance has 16.1 million followers.
The Donald Trump POTUS account has roughly 100,0000 fewer followers on Instagram than Biden's archive as of January 22, 2025. However, Trump's official Instagram account, separate from the POTUS account, has 31.3 million followers. Vance's non-VP account, which has not been updated since November 2024, has 1.3 million followers.
The Ruling
False.
Instagram users were not auto-following Trump's and Vance's accounts. The details of the official president and vice president's social media pages have changed with the new administration. Users may have been following what they thought was Kamala Harris' account when it was, in fact, the vice presidential account.
The social media account transition process has been in place since 2016. Instagram has said the transition, which involves archiving the posts from the former administration and renewing the pages for Trump and his Cabinet, may have also caused follow and unfollow request delays.
FACT CHECK BY Newsweek's Fact Check team
English (US) ·