Some Facebook and Instagram users discovered they were following President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance’s accounts after their inauguration on Monday, Jan. 20. This is likely because they were following White House accounts before Trump and Vance took their oaths of office.
On Monday, Meta spokesman Andy Stone said in a Threads post that the official President of the U.S. and White House accounts are managed by the White House. “They change when the occupant of the White House changes,” Stone wrote.
This also applies to the first lady and vice president accounts.
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In a follow-up Threads post on Wednesday, Jan. 22, Stone claimed that users “were not made to automatically follow” the official Facebook or Instagram accounts of Trump, Vance or first lady Melania Trump.
“Those accounts are managed by the White House so with a new administration, the content on those Pages changes,” Stone wrote. “This is the same procedure we followed during the last presidential transition. It may take some time for follow and unfollow requests to go through as these accounts change hands.”
When Trump took office, the Facebook and Instagram accounts of now-former President Joe Biden were archived. For example, Biden’s Instagram account is now @potus46archive, while Trump’s official White House account is @potus. The @potus46archive account still has its followers, which were also transferred to the new @potus account.
On Facebook, Biden’s archived page is called “President Joe Biden Archived” and has 11 million followers. Trump’s official page is called “President Donald J. Trump” and also has 11 million followers.
Anyone can unfollow pages and profiles by clicking the three dots for the “unfollow” and “block” options.
Katie Harbath, who was Facebook’s director of public policy for global elections before leaving in 2021, explained how the transfers to new administrations worked in 2016 and 2021.
“Just to back up what Andy is saying, my team set up the first ways of having to do this when Trump won in 2016 and we had to transfer the official accounts that President Obama’s team created when Facebook pages were first created,” Harbath wrote on Threads, in response to Stone. “Same was done during the transfer from Trump to Biden. The old ones go to an archived account and the followers remain, but the feed is wiped clean. Most platforms handle it this way.”
Some Facebook and Instagram users claim they are following Trump and Vance’s pages despite not having previously followed political pages. “I was never following either. Happened to several friends as well,” a Threads user claimed. Several Facebook users also claimed this happened in a Reddit thread.
Meta also told the New York Times that it “may take some time for follow and unfollow requests to go through” during the account transitions.
