r/technology Jan 22 '25

Social Media Facebook Says It’s Not Forcing You to Follow Trump

https://www.404media.co/facebook-says-its-not-forcing-you-to-follow-trump/
11.5k Upvotes

1.7k comments sorted by

4.7k

u/carty64 Jan 22 '25

FWIW, my most recent follows on IG were whitehouse and vp and there's a 0% chance that I did that on my own

1.9k

u/Cresomycin Jan 22 '25

Several users have reported that, too. We all know about Meta, but this is a new low. Zuck's greed killed the last bit of integrity they had.

575

u/sceadwian Jan 22 '25

They haven't had integrity in a very long time. They only ever did the bare minimum kicking the can on anything for their actual users.

109

u/trevize1138 Jan 22 '25

Right. There was no integrity to shed. This is just him seeing what he can get away with.

56

u/Im_eating_that Jan 23 '25

From day 1. The main reason I chose not to get on it in the first place is not being able to erase anything permanently from your wall. Somebody is paying the electricity for those servers to keep that data. Big business isn't big on paying out without profit coming in. Fuck Fecebook and the whore it rode in on.

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u/BrandynBlaze Jan 22 '25

It was started because Zuck wanted to rate the appearance of his female classmates in a group setting. Anything they’ve ever done was because they thought it would make them more money, not because they ever had any integrity.

57

u/moderatevalue7 Jan 23 '25

I thought he actually stole the idea off some other people?

35

u/REOspudwagon Jan 23 '25

Pretty much, seems like every major tech company was started by stealing ideas/IP and in some cases straight up physical products from others.

31

u/moderatevalue7 Jan 23 '25

Elon certainly seems to have stolen/grifted everything he is known for, especially his starting company zip2.

I'm not a huge fan of Bezos but I don't think he stole anything really, just kept levelling up.

54

u/buttered_scone Jan 23 '25 edited Jan 23 '25

Bezos was in banking and finance before starting Amazon. He specifically chose books to sell, because of the sheer number of different titles and editions give a large advantage to an online retailer. All success is a matter of preparation, effort, capability, and luck. He made a lot of shrewd decisions; he foresaw where the market was going, but he was still lucky that none of the big book retailers managed to get their shit together online, before he was able to dominate the market.

If Barnes & Noble, or Borders, had better foresight, and invested in online retail early, I don't think Amazon would be the success it was. There was a small window where they could have crushed Bezos, but once Amazon began to create other revenue streams it was over. The big retailers did not take this upstart seriously and bet it all on the market not changing. By the time they caught up with books, Amazon had moved into web hosting, other retail merchandise, setting up delivery infrastructure, etc.

I do not like Jeff Bezos, but I think he's the robber baron with the most skill at the game, in this generation of barons. His rise relied on way less luck and nepotism than Bill Gates, or Elon Musk. That said, I bet he tastes like pork, just like the rest.

Edit: spelling

Edit 2: also, the business strategy of all the big billionaires has been to throw as much money as possible with little thought to timely profitability. Everyone seems to forget Amazon took just shy of a decade to reach consistent profitability. The big retailers were not willing to burn that much capital with no immediate return.

15

u/wickedcold Jan 23 '25

It’s probably easy for younger folks to miss that at one time Amazon was basically IT - that and eBay. Walmart, Best Buy, Target etc had basically either zero online storefront at all, or it was a fucking joke where they clearly told some intern “just make us a webzone, e-commerce or whatever”

They had a gigantic head start because nobody took online shopping seriously back then.

7

u/Own_Chemist_4062 Jan 23 '25 edited Jan 23 '25

I doubt they neglected to do a feasibility study or something. They probably did spend a couple million on it, shelved it because of how costly it would be(not like they could get good IT and the logistics overhaul would just sort itself out), and they had no advocate(s) high up enough on the hierachy to push for that kind of change. The writing was "on the wall" only in hindsight. And you can't just buy out every hyped upstart or invest in every innovative new idea, just look at how many got burned in the dot com bubble that followed. And today, Zuckerberg still gets clowned for his metaverse even though facebook can afford it.

All big businesses are still managed by people, and they eventually decline as they should. Bigger problem is the anti-competitive practices they use when they can get away with it and the crony capitalism that's going to become more common now

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u/rHereLetsGo Jan 23 '25

Agree with all of your points, but the one thing that pisses me off about Bezos to this day is his acquisition of Zappos. This was a total FAIL.

Zappos was an excellent company and all he did was dismantle it. Yes, it still exists today, but only by name. He killed it and nothing has ever come along that remotely compares.

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u/Fran_Kubelik Jan 23 '25

My ultra liberal friend is following Trump and Vance. She died in July

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u/uberares Jan 22 '25

Fb auto followed trump, Vance and the immigran wife of trump on my account. 

61

u/JustSatisfactory Jan 23 '25

I mysteriously started seeing Zuckerberg's posts on my feed a few days ago. I checked and wasn't following him, I checked just now and I am. I did not click that button. Assholes.

7

u/rHereLetsGo Jan 23 '25

Same! I visit FB maybe once a month and after seeing posts about this BS I looked today and discovered that I was “following” Zuckerberg. Uh, not a chance I did that. So he’s unfollowed now, but I’m still pissed.

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u/IAMERROR1234 Jan 22 '25

They had integrity? I deleted my Facebook right after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. That was enough for me.

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u/EPLemonSqueezy Jan 22 '25

They haven't had a shred of dignity in a VERY long time, if ever

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u/PapasGotABrandNewNag Jan 22 '25

Yesterday I noticed on my dead friend’s IG account that he follows JD Vance and Trump.

Shelby has been dead since 2018. He was not a conservative.

Fucking hell.

155

u/Sneezeheat Jan 22 '25

I’m so sorry. What a ghoulish thing they did.

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u/Mechoulams_Left_Foot Jan 22 '25

German here. Followed trump all of a sudden.

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u/MozamFreak-Here Jan 22 '25

I started following the ig accounts @potus and @vp in 2021. A couple days before January 20th this year, I unfollowed the accounts, and it did not add them back, for what it’s worth.

120

u/Mecanno Jan 22 '25

Even if you kept following them, the POTUS account changed to potus46archive. New accounts are being forced onto users, and yesterday, Tr*mp was added to my feed without my choice

20

u/mdp300 Jan 22 '25

That explains why the potus account only had like 7 posts.

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u/ecafsub Jan 22 '25

I just checked my IG and it had Vance as a suggested follow. White House wasn’t.

Deleting it anyway. Hardly ever use it. My FB account is under an alias and only for a droid builder group and I didn’t see anything for gov’t.

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u/merkinmavin Jan 22 '25

I blocked JD Vance and Trump on Facebook yesterday. First thing on my steam this morning was a post from Vance and I was suddenly following him. I blocked him again, checked my blocked accounts, and neither he or Trump appeared. So I did the next logical thing and deleted my accounts. I'm not participating in state sponsored propaganda

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u/galaxystarsmoon Jan 22 '25

Had the same experience. I have a business and a personal account. I followed POTUS on my personal account and forgot to unfollow when Trump took office, so that is on me. But I did NOT follow it on my business account and it was followed last night. My personal FB account also suddenly followed Melania's personal (not flotus) account. I unfollowed and an hour later, it was back in my feed again. I blocked all of them on all accounts.

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u/balling Jan 22 '25

Lol I just checked and I’m getting suggestions to follow Vance and Melania all of a sudden.

Meta must have enough info about me to realize I’m left as fuck so I can only imagine the suggestions people in the center/right are getting now.

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153

u/gweran Jan 22 '25

I am trying to give instagram the benefit of the doubt that I was following potus and vp previously, and when the accounts switched over they somehow showed up as new accounts, which is why they became my most recent follows.

But it’s hard to give them that benefit in the face of everything else, also I should just delete everything meta.

167

u/DigNitty Jan 22 '25

The problem is Instagram did the exact opposite thing last time.

Everyone following the POTUS account during Trump’s first term automatically unfollowed the POTUS account when Biden took over.

24

u/Amelaclya1 Jan 22 '25

Which makes sense. They can't even argue that this is out of convenience for their users, because I would be willing to bet the people who are interested in following both Trump AND Biden, or Kamala AND Vance is very, very small. And for those that actually do, it seems easy enough for them to follow those new accounts on their own.

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u/FuelEnvironmental561 Jan 22 '25

I’m permanently deleting today too.

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u/RozenKristal Jan 22 '25

Dont give benefits of the doubt to corporations. They aren’t making mistakes

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u/Kryptosis Jan 23 '25

The auto follow is one thing, the filtering #obama and #democrat as dangerous terms is another inexcusable mask off moment.

5

u/anatomizethat Jan 23 '25

Fwiw, I thought the same as I was removing them from my account yesterday.

Today they were back. This is intentional.

15

u/bxcv358742 Jan 22 '25

This isn’t what happened. Your join/follow dates for those accounts is January 2025.

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u/djanes376 Jan 22 '25

Yep! My partner looked at her follows and boom there’s Trump and Vance. She unfollowed and hours later they were back in there. Disgusting.

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u/chuck_c Jan 22 '25

Yeah, they may be saying that but my account auto-followed JD Vance, and then when I unfollowed him, it re-followed him

249

u/charcoalist Jan 22 '25

Under Meta’s ‘More Speech and Fewer Mistakes’ moderation overhaul, the Instagram boss says their default settings will reset to enable recommendations of political content from people you don’t follow.

https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/8/24339385/instagram-threads-politics-moderation-adam-mosseri

https://www.msnbc.com/the-reidout/reidout-blog/mark-zuckerberg-meta-trump-kaplan-facebook-rcna186162

251

u/Amelaclya1 Jan 22 '25

Who wants to bet that this favors conservatives?

176

u/Jeryhn Jan 22 '25

Considering they were also actively blocking search results for democrats with "sensitive content" messages, you can bet your ass it does.

47

u/Amelaclya1 Jan 22 '25

Yeah I somehow doubt MAGA users are going to get Bernie Sanders or AOC in their suggested follows.

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u/Gonzos_voiceles_slap Jan 22 '25

Well, who are you gonna believe, you or them?

38

u/chuck_c Jan 22 '25

Good point. I probably spaced out and forgot I re-followed him. Silly me, doubting our algorithmic overlords! lol

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u/ethnicbonsai Jan 23 '25

I logged on to Facebook survival to delete it. At the top of my newsfeed was JD Vance.

Fuck Zuck.

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4.7k

u/tasimm Jan 22 '25

I just deleted my IG and What’s App accounts because of this bs. Meta can kiss my ass.

1.6k

u/Presoiledhalfprice Jan 22 '25

I deleted Meta, and X today.

990

u/Presoiledhalfprice Jan 22 '25

Was actually able to convince an entire friend group to move to a group text instead of using Facebook Messenger. Done with this crap.

393

u/TheBurritoW1zard Jan 22 '25

Same but to discord

363

u/[deleted] Jan 22 '25

[deleted]

330

u/TerrenceNightingale Jan 22 '25

Same but to physical mail

631

u/Green_Ad_3518 Jan 22 '25

Same but to an intricate system of sewer rats carrying encoded messages which can only be decrypted with a Nintendo 64

149

u/[deleted] Jan 22 '25

What was the first rule of sewer rat message Nintendo 64 club, Tyler?

132

u/Barkers_eggs Jan 22 '25

Do not nibble the mail

54

u/andronicus_14 Jan 22 '25

Goddamn it, Tyler.

38

u/VergonioPrado Jan 22 '25

Someone reset the counter. I guess no pizza this week either. Stupid Tyler.

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u/AlaWyrm Jan 22 '25

Same but to smoke signals.

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u/soupbox09 Jan 22 '25

Same but with two tin can attach by a string.

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u/PanicRev Jan 22 '25

Everyone I've convinced to move to Signal ends up thanking me. It's seriously just a great messaging client. Searching threads, viewing only media, notes to self, scheduled delivery, and a desktop client which I personally love as I have a passionate hatred for mobile keyboards. Lots of features, but it doesn't feel like bloat.

6

u/Tiny-Manufacturer957 Jan 22 '25

The one and only thing I don't like about signal is that the message history isn't synced on new devices, but I get why that's the case. They are working on it though, so it'll be the perfect system once that feature gets added.

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u/RR321 Jan 22 '25

This is the way

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u/AimlessWanderer0201 Jan 22 '25

+1 on Discord. All they cared about was staying in touch. They didn’t care what technology it was. Plus Discord is pretty intuitive and gives more breadth by topic creation via channels.

15

u/Difference-Engine Jan 22 '25

Literally just got them to Discord 10 minutes ago!

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u/genericnewlurker Jan 22 '25

I have done the same. Moved several group chats from Facebook to my discord server, each with their own channel. Honestly Discord has been able to fill the gap for Facebook amongst my friend groups pretty well.

Only have one group chat left on Facebook, but that's a bunch of coworkers, and I don't want them on my Discord server. I floated moving it to Signal but that was shot down because they don't want to download a new app. Since my boss is in there, and playing ball with this FB chat has clearly helped out tremendously with getting promoted and getting a raise at my job, I'm kind of stuck.

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u/Comfortable_Word6701 Jan 22 '25

Deleted FB, IG and TikTok…buhbyeeeeee! 🖕🏼🖕🏼

37

u/Lovelycoc0nuts Jan 22 '25

And Amazon for me

16

u/LeftyLu07 Jan 22 '25

My goal is to cut the Amazon cord this year

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u/[deleted] Jan 22 '25

[deleted]

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u/Yinara Jan 22 '25

Deleted x and going to scrape my new Instagram too. They can keep their Nazi shit

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u/cazbot Jan 22 '25

I’ve replaced Twitter and Threads with BlueSky. I’ve replaced Whatsapp and FB Messenger with Signal, and I’ve replaced Facebook and Insta with Vero.

I really like Vero. Like Signal and Whatsapp it requires a phone number for TFA, and it just has a more familiar look and feel. Snapchat and Tumbler aren’t the same.

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u/Icy-Hunter-9600 Jan 22 '25 edited Feb 05 '25

Pressure brands advertising on Meta platforms to stop advertising on these platforms. I assure you this works. It's more powerful than deleting your accounts. Find and send them screenshots of brands' ads on these platforms, send them to their heads of PR (ideally publicly, like in their social media or LinkedIn feeds) and ask them to stop supporting oppression.

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u/Niceromancer Jan 22 '25

The easiest way to pressure them is to leave the platform.

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u/-Accession- Jan 22 '25

Checkmyads does this good work

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u/[deleted] Jan 22 '25 edited Feb 11 '25

[deleted]

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u/Amazing_Library_5045 Jan 22 '25

Every individual makes a difference

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u/erwin4200 Jan 22 '25

THIS! It's no different than voting. If everyone gives bezos $100 less this year or meta gets $10 less from selling your data....it adds up exponentially

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u/erwin4200 Jan 22 '25

We all need to stop giving billionaires our money. Stop shopping Amazon, cancel streaming services, cancel recurring monthly charges and let's FIGHT BACK AGAINST BILLIONAIRES. We made them...we can unmake them

87

u/AxlLight Jan 22 '25

Let's start with one. #DefundElonMusk. 

Just dump everything related to him, dump Twitter, dump Tesla stocks, remove any app or software he has any hand in.  Let's cause him to go bankrupt. Clear out the big bad first, it'll be much easier to focus on one thing than spread your attention to every billionaire out there and making it too difficult to commit to. 

plus, if you manage to really damage one of them, the rest will get the message. And if not, we can move on to them too. 

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u/JohrDinh Jan 22 '25

In economic terms it's really all they listen to at the end of the day. Half the country doesn't like what's going on, and if half the country in a week logged off social media sites and stop feeding the algorithms and ad revenue things would change mighty fast.

People probably too addicted to the noise and fighting to give it up tho, so we stuck.

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u/Apple_Streusels Jan 22 '25

I finally deleted Instagram when I realized I was following JD Vance. I even noticed a handful of liberal friends following the same. That’s a nope.

79

u/anicho01 Jan 22 '25

I noticed in FB, I stopped seeing posts from figures like Bernie Sanders that I followed. My account had also unfollowed AOC, which I definitely did not do.

75

u/GongYooFan Jan 22 '25

instagram did that because I was never following Vance. the WH or Trump. I just unfollowed them

31

u/McG0788 Jan 22 '25

Did you follow POTUS or VP accounts. If you followed Biden or Harris while in office they switched the acct to be trump and vance

9

u/slothslothslothsloth Jan 22 '25

Nope, they archive the old potus and veep accounts and then a new potus/veep account is made, so Instagram did make people follow them. It happened to me

9

u/Never-On-Reddit Jan 22 '25

I didn't, suddenly I was, and it showed chronologically as my most recent follow, ahead of the last person I followed a few days ago.

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u/Freakin_A Jan 22 '25

And this is standard practice. They archive, wipe, and replace official accounts. They also replace websites, which is why the new WH website was broken and didn’t have presidential profiles or the constitution on day 1.

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u/AVmechdude Jan 22 '25

Deleted mine as well

23

u/Squeegee Jan 22 '25

I’m current backing up my meta accounts and shutting them down once completed.

24

u/Niyne Jan 22 '25

I deleted that shit in 2016. Fuck all of them.

18

u/salmark Jan 22 '25

I’m Finding it hard to delete my IG, but I think I’ll survive

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u/BasicChair420 Jan 22 '25

This is the way. Thank you for your service 🫡

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u/DPadres69 Jan 22 '25

Same. FB, Instagram, Messenger, all gone. I’d been contemplating it when Zuck pulled the fact checkers but this was the last straw. They can gaslight all they want but they forced people to follow Trump and co., unfollowed Democrats, blocked “liberal” hashtags, and their algorithm has gone far right. They’re just a branch of MAGA now.

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u/Big-Spirit317 Jan 22 '25

BOOM!!! That's when I was preparing myself mentally to deactivate my accounts when MZ decided to stop the farce of fact checking... I was pissed.

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u/donkeybonner Jan 22 '25

The problem is in my country everyone uses What'sApp, this include the company I work for, I work on the street, that's how I get in contact with coworkers, clients, my boss. I didn't used before I got the job, and work related stuff is the only reason I have to use it. It's the only thing from meta that I have an account.

14

u/harrymfa Jan 22 '25

I was shocked how in Spain all small businesses have delegated their communications to WhatsApp. The country is putting a big chunk of its economy in the hands of an American oligarch. I hope it doesn’t come back to bite them in the ass.

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u/[deleted] Jan 22 '25

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u/Tallgirl4u Jan 22 '25

Just delete all of it people. Your device batteries will thank you not to mention your data

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u/24-Hour-Hate Jan 23 '25

Don’t forget your brain. Your mental health will also thank you. I haven’t been on Facebook in years. I don’t have instagram, twitter, or TikTok either. It has helped.

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u/JuanPunchX Jan 23 '25

Let's not pretend that reddit is rainbows and butterflies for mental health.

43

u/BugRevolutionary4518 Jan 23 '25 edited Jan 23 '25

While true, and I feel you, it’s nothing like following someone you went to high school with on facebook who was a great guy and all of a sudden turned nazi on a whim after a divorce, and he’s Mexican. His mom used to make us tamales. I’ll never understand it. He was never like this before.

Edit; I’m not even responding to the genius who replied.

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u/Rainbow4Bronte Jan 23 '25

The trick with Reddit is to highly curate your subs. Don’t join super toxic subs. Be wary of subs with strong identities or brands. Realize there is a hive mind culture in every sub and question it (to yourself or politely )Also, never share your identity. Don’t get caught up in the upvote/downvote drama. It isn’t real.

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u/Ebiltommy Jan 23 '25

The most hive minded sub is r/hydrohomies, and they're out there doing good work even if I'm still drinking soda.

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u/JuanPunchX Jan 23 '25

Definetly one of the purest subs. Totally forgot about it.

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u/BenWallace04 Jan 23 '25

Reddit is the most customizable imo.

It’s definitely gotten worse over the years but it’s far better than anything Twitter or Meta-related.

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u/dre4mspice Jan 23 '25

This is the answer! Just delete it all. Withdraw. If anyone is looking for a reason to go ahead and do it, let this comment be the push you needed and do it right now.

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u/reg0ner Jan 22 '25

Except for reddit! Our chinese overlords are giving us our safe space to create civil unrest as long as it’s for the side that continues to line their pockets.

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u/ICPGr8Milenko Jan 22 '25 edited Jan 22 '25

Interestingly enough, I wasn't forced to follow him; however, I noticed in my search history that he was my top/latest search. I've NEVER searched for him or sought his page out.

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u/Epicycler Jan 22 '25

We're entering the end stage of corporate captured social media. It starts with being automatically subscribed to either the personality cults of the dear leaders without your consent or subscribed to incredibly problematic and damning opposition groups, but it will eventually mean that you will have to actively stop your account from speaking on your behalf either in support of the regime or in opposition to it with the inclusion of immoral and unethical positions you would never take in reality and which discredit you in the eyes of others.

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u/BMB281 Jan 22 '25 edited Jan 22 '25

Social media has gradually ruined everyone’s lives under the guise of “staying connected” and very few people are aware of it. The algorithms constantly push rage bait content and people’s faux lavish lives to make you constantly angry and unhappy, which has been algorithmically designed to keep you scrolling and keep you perpetually dissatisfied with your own life

150

u/DinoKebab Jan 22 '25

Wait till people hear about this one cool trick called....simply deleting your social media.

122

u/Waramp Jan 22 '25

Wait until you hear about this uncool thing called addiction.

29

u/Timbershoe Jan 22 '25

By raising the prices of medicine, Donald J Trump has cured addiction by making it unaffordable!

Donald J Trump has also created a vaccine against the gay, and by reading this factoid your Medicare has automatically been billed for the vaccination.

Text MAGA to subscribe to trump facts.

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u/RBI_Double Jan 22 '25

UNSUBSCRIBE UNSUBSCRIBE UNSUBSCRIBE UNSUBSCRIBE UNSUBSCRIBE UNSUBSCRIBE UNSUBSCRIBE UNSUBSCRIBE UNSUBSCRIBE UNSUBSCRIBE UNSUBSCRIBE UNSUBSCRIBE UNSUBSCRIBE UNSUBSCRIBE UNSUBSCRIBE UNSUBSCRIBE 

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u/elFistoFucko Jan 22 '25

From personal experience, heroin addiction is way better than what social media can provide.

I think at this point, it might be more ethical, too.

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u/BMB281 Jan 22 '25

Being off social media really is a weight off your shoulders. Reddit is my last remaining one, and every day I see how there’s something on here that pisses me off and manipulates me in getting into pointless arguments.

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u/kp33ze Jan 22 '25

I almost deleted reddit, but then just unfollowed a bunch of subreddits and my experience is much better.

As for pointless arguments I use the trick of asking myself, "do I actually care enough whether I change the person's mind or not?" And the answer is 100% no I don't. So, makes it easier to just not reply and move onto something else.

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u/ayoungtommyleejones Jan 22 '25

Truly nuts that we are in a world where Facebook definitively aided at least one genocide due to their inaction, where their own internal data showed Instagram made you women/girls more likely to kill themselves, and where they carried out psychological experiments on their users without consent to see if they could manipulate the moods of their users. That is like something you'd hear about in a bond villain before zuck got pushed into like a giant cooling tower for his AI and boiled in cooling fluid or something. But nope, it's just the actions of one of the most ubiquitous social media companies in the world, founded by a guy who wanted to rate his classmates tits.

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u/BMB281 Jan 22 '25

Truth really is stranger than fiction. We’re watching CEOs become the villains from the very movies we grew up with

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u/[deleted] Jan 22 '25

A friend didn’t know his IG started automatically following The Orange Man until another friend told him it didn’t look good he was following him. Imagine all the people who won’t notice and how their feed will slowly change - feeding them far right craziness.

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u/LeLumberjack Jan 22 '25

I unfollowed and blocked potus and vp on Insta yesterday morning and they showed up again this morning in my stories.

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u/[deleted] Jan 22 '25

The Grift that keeps on giving.

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u/The_LSD_Soundsystem Jan 22 '25

The Grift that keeps on Grifting.

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u/ineverywaypossible Jan 23 '25

Wtf it made me follow JD Vance too

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u/chuck_c Jan 22 '25

Same for me

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u/bobartig Jan 22 '25

Facebook: "Oops, let me fix that for you."

*re-follows and unblocks POTUS and VP accounts*

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u/BraveOmeter Jan 22 '25

Delete meta

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u/yaxgto Jan 22 '25

Blocked and reported as hate speech lol

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u/Resident-Variation21 Jan 22 '25

Facebook lies. More at 11

245

u/Weightcycycle11 Jan 22 '25

META is lying…again. It happened to me multiple times yesterday so today I blocked them all.

102

u/Banana-phone15 Jan 22 '25

Best if you delete your account

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u/Curious_Run_1538 Jan 22 '25

Everyone keeps complaining but not deleting accounts 🤷🏻‍♀️

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u/JRingo1369 Jan 22 '25

Facebook Says It’s Not Forcing You to Follow Trump

Then it's safe to assume that they are in fact forcing you to follow Trump.

16

u/Ransacky Jan 22 '25

Also, there is no war in Ba Sing Saei.

88

u/Kindly-Maybe8589 Jan 22 '25

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. George Orwell, 1984.

20

u/liverbe Jan 23 '25

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it- Joseph Goebbels, minister of propaganda for the Nazi German government of the Third Reich

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u/SirWobblyOfSausage Jan 22 '25

Delete your accounts.

113

u/[deleted] Jan 22 '25

and no one believes them

33

u/defaultusername-17 Jan 22 '25

lying liars lie about lying.

83

u/Tadpoleonicwars Jan 22 '25

The company that is blocking any Democratic hashtags denies that it is also forcing people to follow Donald Trump?

Sure. We're dumb enough to believe that.

17

u/Purplebuzz Jan 22 '25

Well it seems some people are still dumb enough to use it. So.

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u/Fuzzy-Butterscotch86 Jan 22 '25

Except my extremely liberal bisexual wife would've never followed Trump, or Biden on Instagram and found she was in fact following Trump last night before we both deleted our meta accounts. 

So, my guess is, Meta is full of shit. 

20

u/Banana-phone15 Jan 22 '25

Meta & potus is playing a game with us, it’s called “I am not touching you.” Best thing you can do is delete your Facebook, instagram, WhatsApp account.

26

u/SlippySausageSlapper Jan 22 '25

My Instagram account started following whitehouse and vp sometime in the past few days. I absolutely did not follow those accounts.

They are blatantly lying.

25

u/ramman403 Jan 22 '25

It’s like when iTunes forced that U2 song on everyone.

24

u/stol_ansikte Jan 22 '25

Zuckerberg tried not to be a loser, become an even bigger loser

20

u/Bethjam Jan 22 '25

I wasn't following the former nor the current office holders voluntarily. I was, however, magically following them on Monday. I blocked and deleted my accounts. This was on all platforms.

51

u/mowotlarx Jan 22 '25

Inauguration day I made a point to unfollow and block those accounts on Instagram. I am aware that they archive the old ones, this isn't my first rodeo.

I have had to unfollow and block those accounts 2 more times since Monday. It kept reverting.

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u/Brave-Cash-845 Jan 22 '25

Even on IG I had to block, restrict and unfollow 3 times! The 3rd time I reported them both as hateful speech (block seems to have held)!

13

u/hapaxgraphomenon Jan 22 '25

At this rate it won't be long till their 'report as hate speech' option just turns into 'promote as hate speech'

17

u/LigerXT5 Jan 22 '25

(Over?) Half my feed is posts from people/pages I don't follow.

Half of said non-followed people is spewing government, well anything.

8

u/Muffles79 Jan 22 '25

Mine too. Block 1 and 5 new come back.

I live in the US. I don’t need to follow FB groups from the UK

18

u/CtrlAltDestroy33 Jan 22 '25

They're lying. I didn't follow any of those pages, I woke up yesterday and I was following them. I didn't follow any president, vice president, or first lady previously. I even blocked the danger yam in 2016, and that block was even undone. They overstepped and now they're lying about it.

30

u/[deleted] Jan 22 '25

[deleted]

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u/BananaAvalanche Jan 22 '25

Time to wake up and permanently DELETE your Facebook accounts!

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u/GetrIndia Jan 22 '25

Who still has Facebook???

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u/[deleted] Jan 22 '25

[deleted]

56

u/nicuramar Jan 22 '25

Tons of other people as well. 

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12

u/deicist Jan 22 '25

It's not forcing me to do shit since I deleted it last week.

Before it was cool

12

u/ehopkins557 Jan 22 '25

I’m deleting all those accounts because they tried to meddle with TikTok paying lobbyists to pay our politicians and that’s why we got the ban. Pure American fascist corruption.

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u/NewNewark Jan 22 '25

I understand that folks who followed the "potus" or "vp" account would see the profile change from kamala to vance.

But I dont recall those accounts ever being suggested to me, and theyve been pushing it in my recommended all week. Sure, I have a dozen friends who follow those accounts from the last admin, but none of them recently followed them so its not like theyre a hot new account

11

u/ridemooses Jan 22 '25

Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?

10

u/dannydomenic Jan 22 '25

I have unfollowed and blocked @potus three separate times in the last 24 hours. Next time my account is magically following him is when I delete every account from any company owned by meta.

9

u/MexGrow Jan 22 '25

Facebook certainly forces me to see pro-government propaganda (from my country) on my feed every single day despite how many times I set it to "Do not show this content" or whatever the option is.

7

u/ratherbeona_beach Jan 22 '25

I literally had to unfollow him and Vance. The gaslighting is unreal.

7

u/r0addawg Jan 22 '25

Regardless, Scrub your data, leave their platform, affect their stock prices. Do not just "uninstall." That isn't going to do anything. Scrub your account, then remove

6

u/midazolamandrock Jan 22 '25

Yep getting ready to delete IG, FB and WhatsApp - because they’ve manipulating our data, our feeds and now refusing to own their past wrongdoings by Zuck somehow saying he’s protecting free speech?! Modify Section 230 to hold all these social media platforms (which profit off us) to be accountable. It’s their platform, just like journalists are accountable they should be too.

6

u/pioniere Jan 22 '25

Deleted Facebook 5 years ago. Haven’t missed it in the least.

6

u/Jacobthe Jan 22 '25

Deleted Facebook, Instagram and Twitter the day before the inauguration. Good riddance.

7

u/winter0215 Jan 22 '25

Just a tragic set of coincidences that the hashtags for things like democrats, democracy, rigged, etc. were all blocked at the same time it seems millions of people were auto followed to Trump + Vance with many not being able to unfollow.

Really wild set of coincidences.

edit: making sure my /s is visible for people missing it dripping off my words

6

u/IlikeYuengling Jan 22 '25

A lot of people are saying Zuckerberg is addicted to alpaca semen.

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u/bigtaterman Jan 23 '25

Sounds like something a fascist controlled media would say.

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u/ComprehensiveGas6980 Jan 22 '25

100% happened to me and my wife. We both were not following POTUS or vpotus before. Nor Biden or Kamala.

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u/retrospects Jan 22 '25

Oh sure. Just because I saw it with my own eyes that doesn’t mean it’s not happening. You can’t Gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss your way out of this one you cyborg looking fuck.

5

u/callmeponyo Jan 22 '25

It’s cute that they’re trying to claim it’s “likely because you followed the Harris or the Bidens.” I didn’t follow anyone in the previous administration and yet I’ve had to unfollow Vance on Instagram and block both of Trumps account multiple times.

5

u/MigMiggity Jan 22 '25

I got added to Trump, Melanie and the White House on 20-Jan. I 1000% would it have done that even blitzed out of my mind.

6

u/aspiringshrimp Jan 22 '25

The Instagram account of a friend who passed away years ago started following VP. Meta is lying.

4

u/Capella_SkyHawk Jan 22 '25

Remove all Meta products. Find alternative companies. Don’t forget Verizon and AT&T donated 1 million. Everyone needs to stay strong and stop supporting these companies. Our freedom is being monopolized and we have the power to say no to their products.

4

u/OceanLoversCR Jan 23 '25

I feel like I'm being forced to follow Trump and Musk on Reddit lately. It's time they implement the ability to mute/block posts on keywords here on Reddit. Imagine if we could control this ourselves - no more discussion about blocking x.com from a particular subreddit - let the user choose!

4

u/natural_disaster0 Jan 23 '25

Its funny because i keep getting notifications about JD vance posting and i never once followed or even looked up the guy on social media once. So not forcing me to follow definitely sounds like a outright lie.

5

u/uhhhclem Jan 23 '25

Can't be forced to follow anyone if you delete your account.

9

u/Mycroft_xxx Jan 22 '25

BS. My wife can’t stand Trump and all of a sudden she was following Vance and Melania. Not cool

28

u/FormerChocoAddict Jan 22 '25

Having some sys admin background and based on the piecemeal bits of information I've gleaned from various people's experiences, here's what I think COULD have happened:

Since government positions like POTUS are constantly changing name they have to have a transition process.

  1. They took the existing Biden POTUS account and renamed it with the word "archive".

  2. They created a new Trump POTUS account. This is now the official POTUS account.

  3. Figuring that people who were following POTUS before would want to follow the new POTUS, they automatically added it as a followed account for all those people. This accounts for the started following date being recent.

  4. People forgot that they had followed by Biden POTUS and not realizing this was just intended to be a continuation of that follow, they freaked out thinking that they were forced to follow Trump as pat of some backroom deal. When in fact Facebook was just keeping them following POTUS in general.

  5. To implement this update, Facebook puts out a automated job to update accounts with the new POTUS follow. Because they have so many servers in so many places the job is out there continually running for a period of time until all the accounts are updated on all servers. During this interim time people try to unfollow and the automated job refollows for them. And they interpret that as some kind of subterfuge.

Eventually this automated job will cease and the back log of follows and unfollows will catch up.

This could have been avoided this if they had first archived the Biden POTUS content to a new account, and then just renamed the existing account for Trump. Then people would see that they had followed it sometime ago, and see that it's now named trump, and most people would have realized that it just got renamed for the new president.

12

u/brismit Jan 22 '25

I believe that this is generally the case, but IG had me following Melanoma’s FLOTUS account even though I wasn’t following Dr. Jill’s FLOTUS account there.

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u/IAmAmoral Jan 22 '25

Yes, I figured this is pretty much what was going on. I had a brief heart attack when I saw some friends “following” Vance and Trump on IG, then realized that they probably just hadn’t unfollowed the accounts yet due to the changeover.

I didn’t think this would become major headlines, but any information spreads like wildfire online.

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u/SpaceToaster Jan 22 '25

My wife noticed that Biden was auto-followed when he became POTUS as well. I believe it is because the account gets rotated, so it looks like a new follow.

4

u/Nightflyer3Cubed Jan 22 '25

The real good news is Facebook isn’t forcing me to follow Facebook. So I solved that problem for myself damn near a decade ago when I deleted Facebook.

4

u/Snoo-66734 Jan 22 '25

In the famous words of Bender, Meta can “bite my shiny metal ass” 🤖

4

u/herefor1reason Jan 22 '25

Oh they fucking SAY huh?

4

u/aeroxan Jan 22 '25

They're also not forcing users to remain on the platform.

5

u/PeteBrat Jan 22 '25

No control over fake news and Ai generated imaging will make social media completely fictional. At one point, the trust in what you see and hear will disappear making follow social media nonsensical. Option one, this will bring an end to social media. Option two, this will lead the future generations to Idiocracy.

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u/NeatChest3043 Jan 22 '25

Bullshit... I literally had a post from him on my page, went to hide all and it asked if i wanted to unfollow. The like button was blue for me to like the page, but said i was following.. so for them to say that statement.

3

u/fladave1962 Jan 22 '25

That's bullsh*t! I never followed any official Whitehouse accounts and both the Orange traitor and his couch boy were new follows in my feed until I of course unfollowed both their sorry butts.