Meta is pushing back against claims by social media users who say they were forced to follow Facebook and Instagram accounts belonging to US President Donald Trump, his wife Melania Trump and Vice President JD Vance.

The allegations surfaced on Tuesday, a day after Trump took office, and some users said the platforms, both owned by Meta, made them followers of those accounts without permission.

Pop singer Gracie Abrams said on Instagram that she had to unfollow Trump and Vance's official accounts three times because the platform was “mechanically following” them.

“How interesting. Gotta block them to make sure I'm not close to that. Share if this happens to your accounts too,” he wrote term searches, labeling them as sensitive content.

Meta referred CBC News to its social media communications director Andy Stone's posts.

Stone, writing on the Meta's Threads platform, said the confusion was caused by the previous administration's control of the official @POTUS account to the Trump team.

Anyone who followed @POTUS during the Biden administration, for example, will still be a follower after control of the account is handed over to the new administration.

“People have not been forced to automatically follow any of the official Facebook or Instagram pages of the president, vice president, or first lady,” Stone wrote.

Stone did not directly address claims that some users had to unfollow those accounts multiple times, but said that “it may take some time to process follow and unfollow requests as these accounts change.”

Cathy Harbutt, Facebook's former director of public policy for global elections, wrote in Threads that a similar transition occurred between Barack Obama and Trump, and again between Trump and Joe Biden in 2017.

“The old (Facebook pages) go to the archived account and the followers stay, but the feed gets purged. That's how most platforms do it,” he said.

There is a growing perception that Big Tech is closing in on the Trump administration, said Brett Carraway, an associate professor at the University of Toronto, and that tensions already felt by some in the American public have been exacerbated by the presence of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other tech executives Trump's inauguration.

“With all the concerns about the possibility of authoritarianism visiting the United States, one of the first things that usually happens in a scenario like this is that an authoritarian government will take control of the means of communication,” Carraway said.

“I think the general feeling of mistrust and hostility towards the tech industry is widespread. And it's not only on the left side. I think it's on the right side too,” he said.

Gallup Poll July 2024 showed that Americans across the political spectrum were equally distrustful of big tech companies; Thirty-two percent of Democrats said they have a lot or a lot of confidence in them, followed by 28 percent of independents and 20 percent of Republicans.

The poll was conducted by telephone, with a random sample of 1,005 adults and a margin of error of +4 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.

Young people in particular have experienced a spectrum of controversy surrounding social media companies, such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal with Facebook and, most recently, the potential ban on TikTok in the US, says Cyrus Beschloss, co-founder of Generation Lab in Washington, D.C., which researches is youth and their relationship with government, media, and technology.

“I think they have this kind of hidden inherent insecurity that floats in the ether around them,” Beschloss said.

“My big question is, does it matter? Young people are still going to (use) whatever social media platform they use.”