This article was originally published by Glamour.
If you’re an Instagram user, you may want to check your “following” tab to make sure you’re only following the accounts you mean to. Apparently, shortly after the 2025 inauguration, social media users found that on Instagram and Facebook, which are both owned by Meta, they were following President Trump 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 TL;DR.
Give me the TL;DR.
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.
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Their explanation 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.
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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.
Wait, I need more. What’s the background here?
There’s also confusion because Harris and Biden’s posts have been archived, and maybe the current POTUS accounts are new, but the handles were switched, or…honestly, it’s pretty confusing, and while Meta insists that this is just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. So, to quote Oprah, what is the truth?
Conspiracy-heads may point to Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg’s recent alignment with the right wing and the Trump administration; he not only attended the inauguration but recently announced that Facebook would stop fact-checking and dismantle its diversity programs.
What does the internet think?
They’re pretty annoyed! While social media will always have glitches, you’d think that the last two elections would have given the company ample time to prepare for these handovers and ensure that no extra accounts are automatically added and that unfollowing is as easy as tapping a screen.
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Am I going to care about or remember this in two weeks?
Depends how long it takes for the platform to get its ducks in a row. The more pressing issue for the online community is probably that the guy who bought X is, intentionally or unintentionally, hyping up the nation’s Nazis, and even though he could literally just post “I do not endorse Nazism,” so far, he hasn’t! Wonder what that’s about!
