Is Meta Forcing Users to Follow President Trump and VP Vance? The Drama, Explained

glamour.com:

, social media users found that on Instagram and Facebook, which are both owned by Meta, they were following and Vice President Vance without ever choosing to do so.

But is this a psy op, a glitch, or a secret third option?Here’s everything you need to know in this edition of .On January 21, the day after the inauguration, chatter started to spread online that Meta was artificially inflating Trump’s and Vance’s follower counts by adding people who never intended to follow them.

The evidence was all anecdotal but widespread enough that the company responded.This content can also be viewed on the site it from.This content can also be viewed on the site it from.

is that the executive branch’s accounts are rolled over when a new administration comes into power, so if you were following Biden and Harris, well, now that’s Trump and Vance.This content can also be viewed on the site it from.A spokesperson for Meta also said that “it may take some time” for all of the follow/unfollow requests to go through, explaining why some people are reporting that they had to unfollow the accounts multiple times before it stuck or that the platform won't “let” them unfollow.There’s also confusion because Harris and Biden’s posts have been archived, and maybe the current POTUS accounts are new, but the handles were switched, or…honestly, it’s pretty confusing, and while Meta insists that this is just standard operating procedure and the same thing happened in 2021 and 2017, there are users who claim they never followed any political accounts and are still experiencing the issue.