Meta denies claims circulating on social media that he forced Facebook and Instagram users to follow him president trump‘s official account said the changes some users noticed were standard practice with the transition of POTUS accounts from the previous administration to the incoming administration.
The company also said it is working to resolve an issue on Instagram that caused certain political terms, such as “Democrat” and “Republican,” to be temporarily blocked from search results.
Some Facebook and Instagram users on Monday announced that their accounts would automatically follow the accounts of President Trump, Vice President Vance, and First Lady Melania Trump under the handles @POTUS, @VicePresident, and @FLOTUS, respectively. It was reported that Some said they had never followed the account in the first place and were blocked when they tried to unfollow the page.
Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the company doesn’t force people’s accounts to follow the president’s official accounts on Facebook or Instagram. Instead, those who previously followed POTUS’ official account saw it updated to reflect President Trump. Appointment.
“This is the same procedure we took during the last presidential transition,” Stone said, adding that there could be delays in following and unfollowing “as these accounts rotate.” He added that there is.
“Meta doesn’t let anyone follow accounts, and we never do that,” Nkechi Neji, Meta’s communications director, told CBS News. Neji said people may have forgotten that they chose to follow official White House accounts during the previous administration.
Katie Harvath, who was Facebook’s director of public policy for global elections from 2011 to 2021, helped her team establish the company’s first presidential social media transition when President Obama left office in 2017. said he was involved.
The Trump administration followed the same steps again in 2021, handing over the accounts to the Biden administration. This process allows each president-elect to give their social media profiles a clean slate.
“That way they’ll have the opportunity to set up the page the way they want, put a cover photo, put something jazzy,” Harvath told CBS News. . “It was then decided that regardless of who they belonged to, their followers would be mirrored and copied to a new page, under the assumption that people were following the institution.”
Generally, if a user wants to unfollow an account on Facebook, they can click on the ellipsis on their profile page and press the “unfollow” or “block” button.
Additionally, some Instagram users reported that they didn’t see results for “Democrat” or other political words when they searched, but did see results for “Republican.”
Stone responded to the claims Tuesday, saying technical issues are “impacting people’s ability to search for a variety of hashtags on the platform, not just left-wing hashtags.” Nneji told CBS News on Wednesday that technical issues with searching for political and non-political terms have largely been resolved on the mobile app.
CBS News searched for variations of “Democrat” and “Republican” on the mobile version of Instagram on Wednesday and returned millions of results.
However, on the desktop version of Instagram, the search did not return results for “Republican” and “Democrat” but did yield results for “Republican” and “Democrat.” Additionally, the desktop version had no results for other words, such as “constitution,” while the mobile app had more than 1 million results.
Trump’s personal Facebook and Instagram accounts are Paused After the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the company His post said: incited violence. his account is reactivated In 2023.
The timing of the latest issue has raised concerns among some Facebook and Instagram users. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attended President Trump’s inauguration on Monday, along with other technology leaders including X owner Elon Musk and Amazon executive chairman Jeff Bezos. did.
zuckerberg announced the end He suspended Facebook’s third-party fact-checking program on January 7, citing concerns of bias and over-enforcement of rules. Instead, the platform will take a community approach similar to X’s Community Notes.
Zuckerberg also announced that the platform would gradually start recommending political content, saying he had received feedback that people “didn’t want politics and conflict to take over their experiences.” The February 2021 decision was reversed.
Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief international affairs officer, said in a statement on Meta’s website that the changes are “an attempt to return to our commitment to freedom of expression.”
“It means being vigilant about the impact our policies and systems are having on our ability to have our voices heard, and having the humility to change our approach when we know we’re wrong,” Kaplan said. .
Colin McSherry, legal director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights organization, told CBS News there isn’t enough transparency about how social platforms work for users. Ta.
“That’s a really fundamental issue,” McSherry said. “But the fact that this is happening reflects that, from a user perspective, it’s difficult to actually understand how to set it up and how to set it up, so you’re not getting the content you intended. And I think all platforms still have a long way to go.”
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Eliel Delzer
