Meta admits some people can’t unfollow Donald Trump on Instagram
Users including Gracie Abrams have said they never asked to follow presidential account – and are unable to stop
What a fucking idiotic shitstorm entirely of their own making.
Meta deserves all the shit they get for this transparent act of kowtowing.
They will get zero shit and there will be no repercussions or consequences and Zuckerberg knows that
Zuck has been known to be an unethical person from the early days of Facebook when he constantly turned off people's privacy settings.
"Technical problems."
"Following" and "unfollowing" are pretty basic aspects of the service. How interesting that the "technical problems" only have to do with these specific accounts.
Anything under Meta (FB, Insta, WhatsApp), Twitter/X, TikTok - you should be considering these to be fascist mouthpieces and interpret information gained through them with that lens.
Personally I believe them only because meta has proven to be incompetent time and time again. I’m betting they migrated the followers to the new account, but forgot to update some foreign key and now it errors out when the old code tries to unfollow.
The malice though is in doing this new migration scheme instead of the old method of “update the profile picture and bio”.
There are local servers all around the world. You generally interact with the one closest to you, but it isn't the "single source of truth." At some point changes should be reconciled with the source authority, but all the remote servers are trying to update the source at pretty much the same time. Resolving updates from your global diaspora of servers in an accurate manner is hard and you're likely to see odd bugs arise, especially when a large number of people take similar actions at once. You can see this in trending viral video likes--toggling your like on and off or viewing the video at the same time from 2 different locations is likely to give you a different like count each time. You can also see this when Trump rebrands the official POTUS account and starts spewing his vitriol through it, large numbers of people will realize they don't want to deal with his bull shit, and some of their updates will fail to resolve in a timely manner.
This doesn't happen to everyone, but if you unfollow someone and it works you aren't gonna complain.
Anything under Meta (FB, Insta, WhatsApp), Twitter/X, TikTok - you should be considering these to be fascist mouthpieces and interpret information gained through them with that lens.
Also never forget that Traitorapist Trump told 30800 documented lies in his first term, which comes out to 20-25 lies every day of the week. So we can expect that 20-25 lies are going to come out of Trump's mouth every single day for the next 4 years.
After a decade of wondering why my friends still used Instagram, they're finally talking about uninstalling it this week. So I'm all for these new features, keep em coming zuck!
Make sure to point them towards Pixelfed! The more people we can get onboarded to federated platforms, the better.
I'd love to uninstall it but I can't follow the people I want to follow anywhere else
The good ol' Collective Action Problem.
The thing is, you don't have to leave in order to get out. I know it sounds oxymoronic, but let me explain.
You're not limited to just one social media account, that much is obvious to everybody. So, create an account on a competing platform, and be the reason someone else is able to justify quitting. If someone else says "hey, I want to leave" and you also say "I want to leave too," but neither of you have even made an account elsewhere, nobody ever leaves.
If you make a new account elsewhere, then when that person says "hey, I want to leave," you can say, "follow me on Pixelfed," and even if they don't uninstall Instagram, and just make a Pixelfed account, you're one less instance of
I can’t follow the people I want to follow anywhere else
to keep them stuck there. You've now had them make an account, then someone they know goes through the same process you did, and so on.
Eventually, the alternative is populated enough that deleting the old service isn't difficult anymore. All you have to do is be one of the people to take the first step, and become the reason for someone else to justify leaving.
I had the same problem, left anyway so I wasn't supporting... that, and it turns out it's all ok on the other side. You'll be ok.
I've ended up using Patreon way more now
How long before Zuckerberg does the Nazi salute on stage too?
I don't think he will, but solely because he happens to be Jewish. Same reason Ben Shapiro won't. Because ultimately these are the sort of people who think the nazis are bad not because of what they believed or did, but because of who they targeted.
Just leave Instagram. The quickest way to get rid of a stalking "president".
At this point one should ask if they are trying to make people quit meta on purpose.
Honestly makes me wonder the same. They might be trying to make it a more effective echo chamber
“Some people…” most people I know have been forced to follow POTUS or VP and cannot unfollow. Finally got my wife to delete her accounts
That sounds like a major liability. Think of the hospital bills for all the eye bleaching related injuries if Donnie started posting beach pics...
It would probably work if they just deleted their accounts.
Trump and his cronies are gonna try and use social media like Hitler used the radio. He want his voice in the homes of every German American.
Yep. If you control the biggest source(s) of information, then people eventually will only know what you want them to know.
He want his voice in the homes of every American.
Long ago I started changing the channel whenever Traitorapist Trump was on TV. I don't want to see or listen to a pedophile talking. I can always listen to someone later on summarizing how many lies Trump told.
Obviously, fuck Meta, but....
“People were not made to automatically follow any of the official Facebook or Instagram accounts for the President, Vice President or First Lady,” he wrote on Threads. “Those accounts are managed by the White House so with a new administration, the content on those Pages changes.
“This is the same procedure we followed during the last presidential transition. It may take some time for follow and unfollow requests to go through as these accounts change hands.”
That sounds like a plausible explanation. If you followed when Biden was president, that same account is now Trump's.
Which means there are likely millions of users either unfollowing or following the account since Monday. I'd be surprised if anyone wanted to hear from both Biden and now trump.
I couldn't find an actual article, but here's people complaining about Instagram doing the same thing four years ago:
Old.reddit.com/r/Instagram/comments/l1y2je/unfollowed_and_blocked_the_white_house_account/
Hell, 4 years ago Biden was bitching that Twitter didn't do this
https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/22/politics/biden-twitter-white-house-accounts/index.html
I have heard from at least one person who deliberately unfollowed before Monday who suddenly was following again after the changeover. Maybe there's technical difficulties there, but it's a bad look for sure.
There's just nothing to gain from intentional fuckery tho, and a very plausible reason.
Even if they "unfollowed" it might not have stuck and if they refreshed it still would have been there.
Things changing on the GUI but not where it actually matters is literally the issue here...
So I 100% believe a bunch of people experienced what you're saying.
They're just confusing client side GUI with server side database.
Just kill the account then
False! Everyone can unfollow. There's just a few more steps to delete your account. I was able to do it without issue.
Sounds like a good reason to abandon instagram.
If anyone still needs a reason, they’re probably there to stay.
This is so fucked up. Why anyone would use meta now is beyond me
How long before they start making posts and adding likes in your name?
I checked and I don’t think I was following him. I don’t really use meta accounts. Did this not affect everybody?
Apparently, this happened because people were following biden and kamala. When trump got in, those accounts changed hands and became trump and vance accounts. Apparently thats how they do it. They are accounts for the current president and vice president. Whoever that is.
Good thing i don't have an account on there. I do have a facebook account and checked to see if i I was set follow their pages and Im not. Might have something to so with not following any pages or even really logging in but a fee times a year when my wife pesters about checking my notifications or certain posts from family members
Worth noting that the follow option on your account likely isn’t accurate. That’s a large part of the complaints; I didn’t follow the potus or vp accounts when looking at it on my own page, but my friend saw that I was following them via the “followed by [friend’s name] +[#] more” option. Like when you tap that, it allows you to see which of your mutual friends follow the account. And I showed up on that list. On my own account page, it didn’t show that I was following them. The button said “Follow” so I couldn’t unfollow them.
Here is the vp page from my perspective. Notice that I’m not following it, and therefore can’t unfollow it:
Now here’s my friend’s “your mutual friends follow this account” list, which shows me as a follower:
I had to restrict the vp account, which then updated the “Follow” button into an “unfollow” button. But the fact that I had to restrict the account before I was allowed to unfollow it (because I was being forced to shadow-follow the account) is what people have issues with.
Well thats rude. I’ll have to check the wife's account.
