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| - Users surprised to notice Trump and Vance in their feeds already were following the official presidential and vice-presidential Facebook accounts, which were transferred from the outgoing administration to the incoming administration. Meta has not released any technical details of their account transition process, but there is no evidence that the company handled the 2025 Biden-Trump transition any differently than it did the 2021 Trump-Biden one.
On Jan. 20, 2025, a rumor began to circulate online that Meta, the parent company of social media platform Facebook, had forced users to follow the Facebook pages of Donald Trump and JD Vance following the pair's inauguration as president and vice president, respectively.
Examples of the rumor appeared on Facebook (archived), as well as on other social media platforms including Reddit (archived) and Threads (archived). Multiple readers also wrote in and searched the Snopes website for information about the claim.
(Reddit)
In short, Meta did not forcibly add Trump or Vance to Facebook users' follow lists. Rather, these users had already followed the official presidential and vice-presidential Facebook accounts. These accounts use the handles @POTUS (short for "president of the United States") and @VicePresident, as the screenshots below show. Trump and Vance took control of the accounts on Jan. 20 as part of the presidential transition process.
(@POTUS on Facebook)
(@VicePresident on Facebook)
During the administration of former President Joe Biden, he and his vice president, Kamala Harris, had control of the same two accounts, as archived versions of those pages show. However, the accounts belonged to Biden and Harris only as long as they held the offices of president and vice president. In other words, when their terms ended, so did their control of those accounts.
Trump and Vance both maintained separate Facebook pages before the Jan. 20 inauguration. The handle of Trump's account was @DonaldTrump; Vance's account was @JD-Vance. Both of those accounts were still active at the time of this writing.
The @POTUS and @VicePresident Facebook accounts were not the only social media accounts that changed hands after Trump's inauguration. For example, the outgoing Biden administration also handed over control of the official presidential and vice-presidential accounts on X, which used the handles @POTUS for the president's account and @VP for the vice president's account.
As Reuters reported in 2020, handing over control of official social media accounts has become a standard part of the transition between presidential administrations.
According to a Threads post (archived) from Katie Harbath, who worked as Facebook's public policy director from 2011 to 2021, Facebook appeared to have followed the same procedure for transitioning official accounts to new officeholders that she and her team developed in 2016.
(@katieharbath on Threads)
In an email, Harbath said that according to that procedure, "The followers are also copied over to the new account under the assumption that people were following the institution regardless of who is in power."
Creation Dates
Since the original publication of this story, numerous readers have written in to ask why the @POTUS and @VicePresident accounts on Facebook each show a creation date of Jan. 12 on the "Page transparency" line of their About sections, as can be seen in the below collage of screenshots"
(Left: @POTUS on Facebook/Right: @VicePresident on Facebook)
Meta has not issued any official explanation of the technical side of the account transition process (we'll update this post if they do).
Harbath explained over email that, as part of the procedure her team developed, incoming administrations begin to create their pages — without the official handles attached — in the days or weeks before they take office, while the previous administration is still in control of the official handles. In the case of U.S. presidents-elect, that means they begin to build their official pages at a point of their choosing before Inauguration Day — Jan. 20. "That gives the incoming administration time to set up the page," according to Harbath.
At noon on Inauguration Day, Harbath said, Facebook removes the official handles @POTUS and @VicePresident from the outgoing administration's pages. Those pages are then renamed to signal that they are an archive of that administration's Facebook activity. Facebook then adds the @POTUS and @VicePresident handles to the pages the incoming administration prepared.
Under the Biden administration, the @POTUS and @VicePresident accounts likewise showed creation dates of around a week before that administration's Jan. 20, 2021, inauguration. As can be seen in the below collage of screen grabs from versions of the administration's Facebook pages as archived in early 2021, during Biden's presidency the page transparency section of the @POTUS account said that page was created Jan. 11, 2021. While it was under Harris' control, the same section of the @VicePresident account said it was created Jan. 16, 2021.
(Left: Archived version of @POTUS account About section as it appeared in 2021/Right: Archived version of @VicePresident About section as it appeared in 2021)
In other words, the existence of recent creation dates on transitioned accounts was not a new development in 2025.
Unfollowing and Blocking
A number of readers also wrote in to ask about claims that Meta was not allowing Facebook users to unfollow or block the @POTUS and @VicePresident accounts. The same claim also appeared online in posts on social media sites including Facebook (archived) and Threads (archived).
Reports of technical bugs preventing Facebook users from unfollowing and/or blocking users or pages have circulated online for years. It's possible that users who continued to see posts from the @POTUS and @VicePresident accounts were experiencing this bug.
Although Harbath no longer works at Facebook, she acknowledged the possibility that the unfollow/block bug was behind claims of users being unable to follow the pages. Another possibility, she speculated, was that the @POTUS and @VicePresident posts showing up in the feeds of users who had unfollowed the pages were actually suggested posts from Facebook's algorithm, which automatically shows users posts based on past activity (such as visiting a page), regardless of whether the user is following the account that made the post.
As Facebook notes in its Help Center, "Content suggested for you is personalized based on what may be relevant to you and are influenced by things such as your previous Facebook activity. Content that is suggested for you can be videos, photos, or articles from Pages and groups that you don't already follow."
Meta communications director Andy Stone mentioned the claims in a Jan. 22 Threads post (archived), which read in part: "It may take some time for follow and unfollow requests to go through as these accounts change hands."
(@andymstone on Threads)
In summary, Meta did not force users to follow Trump or Vance. Instead, users who were surprised to see the two politicians' posts pop up in their feed already were following the official presidential and vice-presidential Facebook accounts, which have the handles @POTUS and @VicePresident. We've asked Meta about reports that some users had difficulty unfollowing or blocking the accounts, and will update this story when we have further information.
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