Within a day of the US inauguration, a familiar kind of panic spread on Reddit and X: Facebook, people said, had made them follow Donald Trump and JD Vance. “I never followed Trump or any White House page, and now my feed is full of their official posts,” one user wrote. Another said they had found the president and the first lady in their follow list and could not unfollow them. Enough people reported the same thing that it deserves a proper answer — and most of it is less sinister than it looks.
The page did not move to you. It moved to him.
The likeliest explanation, first set out by the site Tech Issues Today, is the way the official government accounts work. POTUS, VP and FLOTUS are not personal pages; they belong to the office, not the person. When a new president is sworn in, the same page passes to the new office-holder. Anyone who followed the POTUS page during Joe Biden’s term was, on 20 January, following the same page with Donald Trump’s name on it. The follower did nothing; the page changed hands underneath them. The vice-president’s and first lady’s pages changed in the same way.
That accounts for most of the “I never followed him” reports. It does not account for all of them: some users insist they never followed any White House page and still see the posts, and a smaller group say the unfollow button simply does not work. Meta has not commented on any of it, which is what keeps the story alive.
How to check your own follow list
- On the Facebook app, open your profile and tap the three dots → Following (on the web: Settings & privacy → Feed → Reconnect / Unfollow).
- Search the list for “President”, “POTUS”, “Vice President” and “First Lady”. If you followed Biden’s official page at any point, it will be there under Trump’s name.
- Tap Unfollow. If nothing happens, log out and in again, or try from a desktop browser — the report suggests the failures are app glitches rather than policy.
Why Bangladeshi users see it too
Facebook is Bangladesh’s biggest social platform, and plenty of people here followed the White House page in 2020 or 2021 out of curiosity. Those people now get Trump administration posts, and because the feed algorithm favours pages with sudden engagement spikes, the posts surface high. Unfollowing fixes it in one tap. The broader lesson is worth keeping: on Facebook, a page you followed years ago can become something quite different without any notification to you, and a periodic clean-out of the Following list is good hygiene.
