After President Donald Trump’s inauguration on Monday, Jan. 20, some Facebook users reported that their personal accounts automatically followed the new president.
“Just FYI – next time you come online here, make sure to ‘unfollow’ Trump. His account is back here as a page, and somehow I got added automatically,” one person wrote in a Facebook post that’s been shared hundreds of times.
Some people claimed Facebook forced their personal accounts to follow Trump. One user claimed Facebook is “adding people to follow” the official pages for Trump, Vice President JD Vance and First Lady Melania Trump “without consent.”
The claims even spread to Reddit, with several posters there claiming their personal accounts automatically followed Trump and Vance.
Several VERIFY readers, including Connie, reached out to us about the claims and asked the team to look into what happened.
Here’s what we can VERIFY.
THE SOURCES
- Posts by Meta spokesperson Andy Stone on Threads and X
- Archive.today, an online tool that shows snapshots of websites over time
- Official POTUS, FLOTUS, vice president and White House Facebook accounts
- Archived versions of official Facebook pages for former President Joe Biden, former Vice President Kamala Harris and former First Lady Jill Biden
- VERIFY independent analysis of Facebook account followers
WHAT WE FOUND
Many Facebook users’ personal accounts automatically followed Trump, Vance or the White House’s official pages on Inauguration Day. But that’s not because Facebook forced them to do so, as the viral claims suggest.
This likely happened because these Facebook users already followed the official government accounts before Trump was sworn in as the 47th president.
It’s common for presidents to have an account that is managed by their campaign and another government account that’s run by the White House. Trump has both as did Biden.
The official POTUS and White House Facebook accounts are managed by the White House and “change when the occupant of the White House changes,” Andy Stone, a spokesperson for Facebook’s parent company Meta, said in statements on Threads and X.
This is also the case for the official vice president and first lady official accounts on Facebook, VERIFY found.
In other words, when a new president takes office, those official government-managed accounts and their followers transition to members of the new administration. But if you weren’t following those official government accounts before, your account shouldn’t have automatically followed Trump or Vance on Inauguration Day.
VERIFY journalists who did not follow the official POTUS account before Trump took office were not automatically following it after Trump’s inauguration, and our official Facebook page was not automatically added to Trump’s follower list.
Archived versions of the official POTUS and vice president Facebook page show they previously belonged to Biden and Harris before Trump took office again in 2025.
According to Facebook’s page transparency information, the names for the official POTUS, vice president, FLOTUS and White House pages changed on Monday, Jan. 20, 2025.
Separately, the official Facebook accounts for former President Joe Biden, former Vice President Kamala Harris and former First Lady Jill Biden were archived the same day.
This practice of official government Facebook accounts being turned over to members of an incoming presidential administration isn’t new.
VERIFY found archived versions of the POTUS Facebook page, which currently belongs to Trump, showing the page transitioned from Trump after his presidential term began in 2017 to Biden in 2021.