No, Facebook is not forcing you to follow Trump. This is what really happened.
Shortly after President Donald Trump was sworn in Monday, Facebook users began to report that their personal accounts automatically followed the new commander in chief.
“Facebook made my profile auto-follow Trump,” one person complained on Reddit. "Full dictatorship incoming," another person replied.
The allegation spread quickly. A fellow Reddit user attempted to explain: “If you previously followed or liked Vice President Kamala Harris or President (Joe) Biden, those accounts officially changed hands today.”
The POTUS and White House Facebook pages are run by the sitting president. So if users followed the pages under the Biden administration, some users may have been surprised to see the “America is Back” video pop up in their feed.
But that is how presidential transitions work on Facebook, said Andy Stone, spokesman for Facebook parent company Meta.
Biden’s POTUS page was archived when he left office. His POTUS page has the same number of followers as Trump’s POTUS page: 11 million.
Katie Harbath, Facebook's former election boss whose team set up the transfer of social media power, confirmed that this is in fact what happened.
"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," she said on Threads. "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."
With Trump in office and Republicans in full control of Congress, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and other tech titans have signaled their support for the new administration.
In the Capitol Rotunda as Trump was sworn in as the 47th president, Zuckerberg, Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos – collectively worth just shy of a trillion dollars – sat in front of Trump’s cabinet picks and behind his family.
(This story was updated to add new information.)