New Orleans I don’t have the bandwidth to keep up with Instagram, despite its popularity. I’ve had my chances. I will never forget standing in a small pocket park across from the campaign offices of the now defunct Ecuadorian party, Ruptura 25, as the main Quito candidate tried to share with me her excitement at the various ways you could change camera filters on Instagram in 2012. I still passed.
Meta, the owner of the mega social media platform Facebook, also owns both WhatsApp and Instagram, which is wildly popular among younger people. The whole shebang is owned by Mark Zuckerberg. In recent days, Zuckerberg, always the opportunist, has pivoted away from content controls and become obsequious when it comes to President Trump by bending the knee, kissing the ring, helping pay for the inauguration, and just generally sucking up. His turn to the right has been so rapid that many of the users of his social platforms have gotten whiplash trying to keep up. People are confused whether this is the mega Facebook with over a billion users or the MAGA Facebook now.
In recent days, his synchro phasing has eroded confidence and trust in the neutrality of the platforms. I’ve overheard Instagram users, even in my New Orleans snowbound bunker, complain that after the inauguration they were auto-enrolled as followers of President Trump and VP Vance. When they went in the guts of the app to “block” and “unfollow” them, the next day they found that they were still enrolled, and had to go through the procedure once again. This was curious, so I asked Google, which might or might not tell me the truth, about this reported intrusion.
They sent me to Newsweek, which was just one of the news sites that seems to have heard these mass complaints of a fresh Trump conspiracy linked the kowtowing of Zuckerberg to Trump. It turns out that Newsweek still has fact checkers. Here’s their verdict on the claims of Zuckerberg manipulating Instagram followers for the new White House team: FALSE. They say:
Instagram users were not auto-following Trump’s and Vance’s accounts. The details of the official president and vice president’s social media pages have changed with the new administration. Users may have been following what they thought was Kamala Harris‘ account when it was, in fact, the vice-presidential account. The social media account transition process has been in place since 2016. Instagram has said the transition, which involves archiving the posts from the former administration and renewing the pages for Trump and his Cabinet, may have also caused follow and unfollow request delays.
They also report that the information on the Biden-Harris accounts are already in the process of being successfully transitioned to the National Archives, the same bunch that had so much trouble getting boxes of documents that Trump had slipped down to Mar-a-Largo. Nonetheless, this has to be a new nadir of Meta’s reputation. If it’s not nonpartisan, how can it have any value?
I heard another rumor that Google, also in suck-up mode with Trump, had removed President Biden from the list of presidents when you do a search on their site. I can confirm that Ol’ Joe is still prominently displayed on the list when you ask Google for help, so that’s false, too, but underlines the same galloping credibility gap.
Here’s my takeaway. It’s going to be bad, very bad, and that’s the truth. We need to keep our shoulder to the wheel and our eyes on the grape, so we’re not distracted by false flags when there is so much real evil in front of us.