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New York (CNN) — Social media users, including celebrities such as singers Demi Lovato and Gracie Abrams, are posting complaints that Meta won’t let them unfollow President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and first lady Melania Trump on Instagram.
On her Instagram story, Abrams said she had to unfollow the @vp and @potus accounts three separate times because Meta kept automatically refollowing the accounts.
“How curious!” the singer wrote. “Had to block them in order to make sure I am nowhere near that.”
Demi Lovato on her Instagram story said: “I have unfollowed this guy twice today.”
Other social media users are posting heads ups to unfollow the accounts if they don’t support the Trump administration.
And some users raised concerns that the hashtag #Democrat was blocked on Instagram this week. On Tuesday, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said that the company was working to resolve an issue that affected the search function for different hashtags and that it didn’t just affect hashtags “on the left.”
But Meta denied that it forced users to follow Trump and Vance’s accounts. The accounts for the president, vice president and first lady change with every administration, the company said.
“People were not made to automatically follow any of the official Facebook or Instagram accounts for the President, Vice President or First Lady,” Stone said in a post on X on Wednesday. “This is the same procedure we followed during the last presidential transition.”
In 2020, Meta told Reuters that it was planning to transition the Facebook and Instagram accounts to the Biden administration, just as it had done between the Obama and Trump administrations in 2017.
Stone added, “It may take some time for follow and unfollow requests to go through as these accounts change hands.”
Still, the incident adds to the recent liberal skepticism surrounding Meta, which has taken a decidedly right-wing policy turn in recent weeks.
In the lead-up to Trump’s inauguration, Meta replaced its top policy executive with a prominent Republican and named Trump ally and UFC boss Dana White to its board of directors. The company also announced it was ending its third-party fact-checking programs in the United States and changing its hateful conduct policies, allowing some new types of content — including referring to “women as household objects,” according to the updated policy — on Meta-owned platforms.
Meta recently ended its diversity, equity and inclusion programs. That same day, CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast, claiming that he had been working on these company shifts “for a long time” and that the excessive content moderation and fact-checking “destroyed trust” on the platform.
Zuckerberg was one of several billionaire tech leaders to attend Trump’s inauguration Monday.
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