Meta is rejecting claims by social media users who say they were forced to monitor Facebook and Instagram accounts belonging to US President Donald Trump, his wife Melania Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
The accusations took hold on Tuesday, a day after Trump took office, with some users saying the platforms, both owned by Meta, made them followers of those accounts without permission.
Pop singer Gracie Abrams said on Instagram that she had to unfollow Trump and Vance’s official pages three times because the platform “auto-followed” them.
“How weird! I had to block them to make sure I wasn’t even close to it. I’m sharing in case this happens to your accounts too,” she wrote. Others claimed that Meta censored searches for terms like “Democrats” on its platforms by marking them as sensitive content.
Meta referred CBC News to its communications director Andy Stone’s social media posts.
Stone, writing on Meta’s Threads platform, said the confusion arose because the previous administration gave control of the official @POTUS account to the Trump team.
Anyone who followed @POTUS during the Biden administration, for example, will continue to be a follower once control of the account is handed over to the new administration.
“People are not made to automatically follow any official Facebook or Instagram account of the president, vice president or first lady,” Stone wrote.
Stone did not directly address claims that some users had to unfollow those accounts multiple times, but said that “it may take some time for follow and unfollow requests to go through as these accounts change hands.”
Katie Harbath, former director of public policy for global elections at Facebook, wrote on Threads that a similar transition occurred between Barack Obama and Trump, and again between Trump and Joe Biden in 2017.
“Dude [Facebook pages] go to the archived account and the followers remain but the feed is deleted. Most platforms handle it this way,” she said.
There is a growing perception that Big Tech is closing in on the Trump administration, says Brett Caraway, an associate professor at the University of Toronto, and that the tension already felt by some of the American public was exacerbated by the presence of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other tech executives at Trump’s inauguration.
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“For all the concern about the possibility of authoritarianism visiting the United States, one of the first things that usually happens in such a scenario is that an authoritarian government would take control of the means of communication,” Caraway said.
“I think the general sense of mistrust and hostility directed at the tech industry is pervasive. And not just on the left. I think it’s on the right as well,” he said.
July 2024 Gallup poll showed that Americans across the political spectrum were similarly distrustful of big tech companies; with 32 percent of Democrats saying they have a lot or a lot of confidence in them, followed by 28 percent of independents and 20 percent of Republicans.
The poll was conducted by telephone with a random sample of 1,005 adults and has a margin of error of +4 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.
Young people in particular have lived through a series of controversies involving social media companies, such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal with Facebook and, more recently, the potential ban on TikTok in the US, says Cyrus Beschloss, co-founder of Generation Lab in Washington, which studies young people and their relationship with government. , media and technology.
“I think they have this kind of latent inherent mistrust floating in the ether around them,” Beschloss said.
“My big question is, does it matter? Young people still want it [use] whatever social media platform you use.”
