With Donald Trump back in the White House, some social media users have been left curious about why they're now following the new president and vice president on Instagram.
Now to be clear, this isn’t people who started following Donald Trump and JD Vance and then forgot about it.
Multiple users on Instagram have claimed that they never went to either one of their pages but are now - for some reason - getting updates about them on their feeds.
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Some even claimed to have unfollowed the politicians multiple times.
As you can imagine this has sparked a few odd theories but the explanation is pretty straightforward and considerably less exciting.
Why am I automatically following Donald Trump and JD Vance on Instagram?
Meta, who owns Instagram, spokesman Andy Stone explained what was going on in hopes of quelling the fears of those affected.
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Writing on Threads, he said: “A reminder: the Facebook.com/POTUS and Facebook.com/White… accounts are managed by the White House. They change when the occupant of the White House changes.”
It's worth noting that this also applies to the first lady and vice president accounts.
So when Trump took office on January 20, 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.
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Biden’s account still has its followers but they 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. While Trump’s official page is named 'President Donald J. Trump' and also has 11 million followers.
Facebook’s former director of public policy for global elections, Katie Harbath, said this wasn’t anything particularly new and explained how transfers to new administrations worked in 2016 and 2021.
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In her own Thread post, she commented: “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.
“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.”
Thankfully, if you don’t want to follow Trump or Vance then the process of unfollowing or blocking them remains exactly the same - simply click the three dots for the 'unfollow' and 'block' options.
Topics: Donald Trump, Instagram, Social Media, Politics
Gerrard Kaonga