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.
I definitely would consider currying favor with the incoming administration a potential gain, which is why even if this is truly a technical error, so many people would believe otherwise considering the messaging from Meta these past few weeks. Regardless of intentions, Meta has failed in their user experience at a time when many people are evaluating if these platforms are worth the trouble- purely as a tech business that seems like quite the misstep. Of course, the truth is that it doesn’t matter, we already know Meta is bowing to right wing pressure and actively choosing to allow harm to LGBTQ+, women, and other minorities on their platforms, and they shouldn’t get plausible deniability for their mistakes.
so many people would believe otherwise
Just like they did four years ago when the same thing happened…
Sounds like a good reason to abandon instagram.
If anyone still needs a reason, they’re probably there to stay.
“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.
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.
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”.
I’d expect more broken things if that were the case?
Depends on how carefully they follow separation of concerns, I suppose. I’ve seen errors exactly like this before where old data couldn’t be deleted but new data could be deleted without issue.
To be clear, I am not defending them, nor am I entirely writing off the zuckbot doing this on purpose. Just without further evidence, it is easy for me to assume they are incompetent.
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.
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.
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
GermanAmerican.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.
Just kill the account then
“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
Just leave Instagram. The quickest way to get rid of a stalking “president”.
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.
Damn, I like the way you put that. Very succinct.
I’ve been saying it about Shapiro and Prager for years. Anyone can be a fascist regardless of background, it’s important to acknowledge the groups that were targeted and to understand that they will likely be targeted again, but acting like Jewish people, queer people, roma, etc are specially pure and good or like Germans, Italians, Japanese, and Spaniards are specially capable of evil is thinking in the lines fascism wants you to.
Fascism is wrong and evil because the ideas behind it are foolish and cruel. It turns class politics into identity politics for powerful identities (organizing as an identity isn’t bad when it’s the vulnerable, there’s a huge difference between the deaf organizing as the deaf and the hearing organizing as the hearing). It proposes simplistic and contradictory narratives that point towards destruction rather than construction, towards hate rather than love, and towards selfishness rather than empathy. It’s the worst aspects of human nature
Well said.
I give it 2 years depending on if he wants to keep his job or not and how little he thinks his soul is worth
He’s long, long past any sentimentality about his “soul”. Musk is insane, but Zuckerberg is calculating. He wouldn’t show up on stage doing a salute unless he knows he stands to gain.
There’s some thriller book around the collapse of the US power grid that had a Zuck in it, he pre-replaced all his teeth with ceramic (I think?) so he’d never need a dentist. Had a bunker built off-book twice underground with food, supplies, security.
I assume this Zuck is that Zuck (6 months from now, with our current timeline speed.)
That Zuck died pretty quick, hilariously. Terrible people never win in the end, and they’re always alone.
It’s not because a fiction book on the human condition is right, it’s because when it comes right down to it, survival of the fittest kicks in, and no being in the universe would pick a piece of garbage as the winning choice.
The mistake these oligarchs always make, is that they think the “alpha male” in a pack chose his role because he was greedy and powerful. In reality, the alpha male was chosen by the pack, because he was the best chance of the pack’s survival.
I think a lot ot these tech bros bear a great irony to the concept of survival of the fittest. They were absolutely the fittest to a period of the early 21st century where a middle class kid with enough brains and work ethic in the right place with the right idea and no ethics or hesitation could become incredibly wealthy and powerful. But they created a collapse or merely drastically amplified one that was coming instead of trying to prevent it. Or maybe even they are trying, but the traits that allowed them to rise to power made them unable to actually help.
But regardless, they cannot function in lean times. They’re the socioeconomic equivalent to hypercarnivores. It’s a great position when times are good for it, but it’s not a stable one. In lean times the fittest species are often small omnivorous scavengers who don’t use too much energy to sustain themselves
Ceramic teeth don’t prevent gum disease…
These people need the libertarian myth of the alpha male/ubermensch because otherwise, they’d have to face the fact the their success is really from inheritance and luck. Hard work and intelligence doesn’t take you very far when, statistically, your boss is a sociopath.
Exactly. I’m saying if Trump makes the guy and the other billionaires do it and he wants to keep his job, he might do it.
False! Everyone can unfollow. There’s just a few more steps to delete your account. I was able to do it without issue.
This is so fucked up. Why anyone would use meta now is beyond me
It would probably work if they just deleted their 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…
What a fucking idiotic shitstorm entirely of their own making.
Meta deserves all the shit they get for this transparent act of kowtowing.
Zuck has been known to be an unethical person from the early days of Facebook when he constantly turned off people’s privacy settings.
They will get zero shit and there will be no repercussions or consequences and Zuckerberg knows that
It sure looks like they’re getting shit right now - I don’t disagree with your cynicism about long term effects though. If everyone “outraged” by this continues to use their service this will have very little effect on them in the long term.
You know all the older folk on there want is a place to see their folks and share pictures. Wonder why there isn’t a strong alternative
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
