from Hacker News

Meta under fire for making users follow Trump and Vance

by ungut on 1/21/25, 3:03 PM with 9 comments

• by accrual on 1/21/25, 4:17 PM

  This is extremely chilling. The US government is now in the pocket of a few.

• by a_puppy on 1/21/25, 5:06 PM

  I tried searching for "#democrats" on my own Instagram account, and I can confirm it's returning no results. Meta issued a statement saying this was a bug, and some people are saying it's fixed, but it's still broken for me at the time of posting this comment.

  My Facebook account is not following Trump or Vance. The article mentioned a theory that some people were following the "POTUS" account, which changed hands; I was never following the "POTUS" account. That seems plausible to me.

• by lern_too_spel on 1/21/25, 4:58 PM

  It sounds like these people were following #POTUS, and that account changed hands. The article separately mentions a sensitive content censoring issue that was a real problem.

• by xx00xxggrr on 1/26/25, 10:19 PM

  People should stop using(or get used by rather) these crappy platforms. No access to the source code, hence no accountability.

• by zeeed on 1/22/25, 7:29 AM

  Why isn’t this higher up on HN? If true that feels like an unprecedented influence over socials