Facebook users have accused Meta of compelling them to follow new U.S. president Donald Trump and his vice JD Vance.
One of such users posted on Reddit on 21 January that she was dumping Facebook because of the incident as well as the platform’s AI invasion.
Several Redditors supported the post, indicating that there are many other Facebook users out there being upset by the same experience.
Meta platforms face backlash
Since Trump’s swearing in yesterday 20 January, there have been complaints that Meta platforms are favoring the new administration.
Apart from Facebook, Instagram has also been accused of hiding search results for the terms ‘Democrats’ and ‘Democrat’. This has led to a lot of outrage, causing some users to delete their accounts on both platforms.
Some of the users are also outright angry because Mark Zuckerberg has openly shown support for the newly inaugurated president. One Redditor wrote on following POTUS accounts which are said to automatically change with administrations.
“It is possible that I followed those accts. I’m still not going to use Facebook because Mark clearly supports Trump now and was at the inauguration right next to Elon.”
Despite unfollowing the accounts, some users also claim that they find their accounts automatically following the two leaders after some time.
Although no explanation has been given, this could be due to technical glitches, and Instagram’s search results have been restored.
Mark Zuckerberg’s actions
One reason there’s suspicion that Meta is deliberately compelling users to follow Trump is because of his actions shortly after Trump was declared president-elect.
Zuckerberg at the time made some sweeping changes on Meta platforms, including the termination of fact-checking on Facebook, the dropping of DEI policies etc, which suggested that he was complying with the Republican ideology of free speech.