Many Instagram users this week had their scrolling interrupted by the bearded visage of our newly elected Vice President JD Vance. Suddenly it seemed that on the week of their inauguration, everybody on the app was following or being suggested to follow the official accounts of President Donald Trump and Vance (@POTUS and @VP, respectively).

Chaos ensued. In group chats, on Instagram Stories, on X, and Bluesky, people frantically wondered what was up. Some, like pop stars Gracie Abrams and Demi Lovato, said that when they tried to unfollow the VP and POTUS accounts, the app wouldn’t let them until they attempted multiple times. Other hashtags appeared to be banned or hidden, like #jan6 or #democrat.

Meta, meanwhile, has been busy assuring users that nothing new or weird is going on here. The accounts for the POTUS and VP, including their followers, were automatically handed over to the new administration as is customary during a presidential transition, while the accounts for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris previously under those usernames would be duplicated in an archive account. They’ve said it “may take some time for follow and unfollow requests to go through” but did not provide details when asked by the New York Times why that might be. Hashtags like #democrat were hidden, Meta said, due to “an error” that affected many hashtags, not just left-leaning ones (those hashtags are now visible).

The episode came just weeks after Meta, Instagram, and Facebook’s parent company, announced sweeping changes to the platforms: CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he would be firing Meta’s fact-checkers and relaxing standards for moderating posts in an effort to prevent “bias” and “censorship” — a move that was widely read as an attempt to curry favor with the Trump administration. Since 2018, Instagram and Facebook have deprioritized political and news content; now, it plans to bring these topics back to the forefront of users’ feeds.

Meta’s assurances that they are not boosting certain accounts or censoring others, and that these issues are no more than glitches may very well be true. But due to the secretive, black box nature of algorithms like Meta’s, it’s very hard to fact-check such claims.

Jillian York, author of

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