Featured Image Credit: Pool/Pool / Anna Barclay/Contributor / Getty
Meta, the parent company of social media giants Facebook and Instagram, has pushed back against claims that the platforms 'forced' users to follow both US President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance following the inauguration on Monday.
Many users were left shocked to realize that they were following at least one of Trump and Vance shortly after the pair were officially inaugurated on Monday, where billionaires, including Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, worth over $4,500,000,000,000 were in attendance.
It got to the point where even celebrities were complaining about the apparent issue, as Demi Lovato took to her stories on Instagram to allege that something 'shady' was going on.
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Outside of simply following the account when they had no recollection of doing so, another major issue that cropped up across social media was that many found themselves unable to successfully unfollow the account, as doing so would only result in you following them automatically again, surviving even block attempts.
Meta have clarified their position on the controversy though, as the company's spokesperson Andy Stone outlined, as reported by the BBC:
"This is the same procedure we followed during the last presidential transition," adding that it "may take some time for follow and unfollow requests to go through as these accounts change hands."
What many hadn't realized is that the 'Trump' and 'Vance' accounts that they were following were actually the official accounts for the President of the United States (with the handle 'potus') and the Vice President (with the handle 'vp').
It is likely that anyone who found that they were following either without their consent were instead simply following the official government accounts of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and didn't realize that the transition had been officially made.
As for not being able to unfollow them, Meta chalks it down to the changing over process, although it's likely that the significant number of people rushing to either follow or unfollow the accounts caused a backlog of unreliability in Instagram's servers.
Many remain suspicious though, especially after Zuckerberg handed over $1,000,000 to Trump and controversially changed hate speech guidelines across Meta platforms to allow users to target LGBTQ individuals.
Hopefully the chaos will calm down soon and everyone will actually get to decide whether they want to follow the accounts or not, but it appears to have been one large mishap that only raised the anger levels many were experiencing during the inauguration.
