Instagram Users Raged over Auto-Follow for Trump, Melania, and Vance

A different kind of chaos reigned on Meta’s Instagram following President Donald Trump inauguration last Monday, leaving thousands of users perplexed about the sudden Instagram auto follow wave after realizing they are following President Trump’s account, Vice President JD Vance, and First Lady Melania without users’ consent.

For a lot of users, the wave of Instagram auto following accounts became a persistent issue as everything they attempted to unfollow or block Trump, Milania, and Vance’s account they realized that not too long after, they were again following the same account, without any consent.

Does Instagram Auto Follow Accounts?

Instagram auto following accounts became a real issue for users as they took their frustration to Reddit, expressing extreme discontent to the abrupt breach of their digital freedom.

One Reddit user wrote in frustration, “I had to block that Level 5 clinger 3 different times yesterday,” speaking of Vance’s account.

Meta had provided a statement to comment on the Instagram auto follow issue on Meta’s Twitter Wanna-Be microblogging platform, Threads, attempting to clarify, or more accurately justify, that this was nothing but standard operating procedure during presidential transitions.

“People were not made to automatically follow any of the official Facebook or Instagram accounts for the President, Vice President or First Lady,” said Andy M. Stone, Meta’s Communication Director, adding that “those accounts are managed by the White House so with a new administration, the content on those Pages changes. This is the same procedure we followed during the last presidential transition.”

https://www.threads.net/@andymstone/post/DFImiJsPblY

But users did not buy into Stone’s claims, with some calling his claims as “gaslighting users,” and another user saying that “it didn’t happen to me. It didn’t happen to a lot of Facebook and Instagram users.”

“Save your energy for a real fight,” responded the user to another user’s post.

Instagram auto follow works when users who were following the account prior to the inauguration so they are automatically made followers of the new alternative archive-account: @potus46archive.

Katie Harbath former head of public policy at Meta, seconded Andy Stone’s statement of the general process of the auto follow on Instagram change. It started during the 2016 election, with the transfer of accounts from President Obama to President Trump, Harbath said.

“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,” she added.

Instagram Auto Follow and Algorithm Issues

After the Meta allowed the auto follow people on Instagram feature, several users complained of increased contents from Trump and accounts related to him showing up in their feeds.

Meta said its algorithms tend to suggest more political content to users who interact with such posts. Then, there were reports of broken search results, particularly for searches containing terms like “Democrat.”

Meta said the issue impacted several hashtags on Instagram and when Vanity Fair Thursday, contacted Meta for more details, the following did not provide further details.

does Instagram auto follow accounts?

Well, yes, Meta does apply such policy in selected events.

In this very case, social media’s transition and shift in how it manages its operations behind closed doors has been revealing to users a very complex situation where Meta is imposing rules on users without their explicit awareness.

Zuckerberg’s Meta has recently implemented new policies, but that doesn’t mean the ones were user-friendly – as much as the tech giant would like to portray them as so. Meta’s content moderation policies are criticized for their lack of transparency, where users remain oblivious to the plethora of guidelines governing content. Zuckerberg has the opacity to suppress freedom of expression, silent active voices, and in certain cases, pushing users to self-sensor.

Until Meta clarifies and provides users with further details, it’s possible the tech giant’s users will have to do some unfollowing and accounts adjusting to avoid seeing President Trump, the First Lady, and JD Vance on their feed.

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