After the inauguration, users of Facebook and Instagram found they appeared to be following the President, Vice President and First Lady without having chosen to. Some who tried to unfollow found the change did not take.
The explanation is mundane, and the same mechanism will produce the same confusion at every transition.
What Meta said
Meta's communications director Andy Stone stated: "People were not made to automatically follow any of the official Facebook or Instagram accounts for the President, Vice President or First Lady."
The content on accounts managed by the White House changes with each administration, Stone said — a procedure Meta followed at the previous transition too. He added that "it may take some time for follow and unfollow requests to go through as these accounts change hands".
The mechanism
The distinction people miss is between a personal account and an institutional one.
@POTUS and @VicePresident belong to the offices, not the officeholders. They are government-managed, and at each inauguration they are handed to the incoming administration. The followers transfer with the account, because the point of the account is continuity: someone who followed the office to receive official announcements continues to receive them.
So the sequence from a user's side is: you followed @POTUS at some earlier point; the account changed hands; you are now following a different person's posts through the same account you chose to follow. Nothing was added to your following list. What the list pointed at changed.
The unfollow failures have a separate and even duller cause: during a handover these accounts process an enormous volume of follow and unfollow requests at once, and the queue takes time to clear. People who tried, saw no change, and concluded they were being prevented were mostly looking at lag.
Why the explanation did not land
Worth saying plainly: the suspicion was not unreasonable, even though it was wrong.
Users have no visibility into which accounts are institutional and which are personal — the interface presents them identically. And the platforms have a documented history of changing what appears in feeds without telling anyone, which means "the platform did something to my account" is a prior that has been earned.
The lesson for anyone assessing a claim like this is to ask what the alternative explanation would require. Auto-following tens of millions of accounts to a political figure would be visible in the data, actionable, and catastrophic for a company already under regulatory scrutiny on both sides of American politics. A queue of unfollow requests clearing slowly requires nothing but ordinary engineering.
If you want to stop seeing it
- Open the account's profile and tap Following → Unfollow. If it does not take immediately during a transition period, try again later rather than repeatedly.
- If you would rather keep the follow but not the posts, use Mute on Instagram or Unfollow (while remaining a friend/follower) on Facebook — the post stops appearing without severing the connection.
- Check Settings → Follows and followers if you want to audit what you actually follow. Most people find several accounts they do not remember choosing, almost always because the account was renamed or repurposed since.
Sources: Meta's statement via Andy Stone; ABC News; Business Insider; Fox 13 Seattle; and Prothom Alo's original report.
