Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg looking stone-faced and head-on during the inauguration of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda.
Photo by Kenny Holston-Pool/Getty Images

Meta under fire for shadow-banning Democratic politicians and news, auto-following Trump

A distressing new development with Meta’s social media platforms has many users questioning whether the company is purposefully censoring socialist accounts and hashtags in favor of alt-right views and personalities. 

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The British outlet Tech-Issues Today released an article this morning with screenshots as evidence supporting their claims that U.K. Meta users on Facebook and Instagram were involuntarily following President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance on the various platforms. There was also evidence that leftist hashtags were being shadow-banned and categorized as “sensitive content.” 

Reddit User cursed_phoenix replied to a post with this to say: “I don’t usually believe this sort of news, but I just went onto my Insta account and sure enough, #Democrat is banned, referring to it as a “sensitive content.” I’m a UK resident. What the actual F.” 

A few hours later, these issues were rectified by Meta with a statement to the BBC, saying, “We’re aware of an error affecting hashtags across the political spectrum and we are working quickly to resolve it.” However, we would be remiss not to note how politically motivated this alleged error appears. 

This all came up after Meta’s Founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, attended the inauguration of Republican President Donald Trump, loudly publicizing his support for the president. It is also important to mention that Meta released a statement on Jan. 7 stating the company would stop fact-checking users, posts, and advertisements on its social media sites — a feature largely encouraged by the U.S. government following Facebook’s failure during the 2016 presidential race wherein the site spread misinformation via propaganda ads allegedly bought by Russian bots. That is to say that Meta has a history of political bias. 

Many social media users outside the Meta umbrella have commented on this predicament. Some have proposed boycotts of Meta apps, such as Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Threads, WhatsApp, etc., to show distaste for these policy changes and as retribution for Meta’s alleged involvement in the U.S. TikTok ban. 

Other users have noted that Meta’s alleged censorship has migrated to TikTok following the brief 12-hour ban in the United States. They claim and present screenshots as evidence of leftist hashtags and titled content being flagged as bullying or misinformation. This has caused others to connect the dots between the alleged censorship and TikTok boldly thanking Trump for his assistance in disrupting the nationwide ban. 

Although these social media issues were quickly resolved by their parent companies, there is still much to be concerned about regarding communication sites and the overarching rule of the CEO class that can switch policy, build bias algorithms, and ultimately control the media narrative to suit their views and every whim. It is important to note that shortly after Trump was elected President, many mass corporations canceled their DEI programs, not limited to but including Meta, Amazon, and most recently, the FBI. This makes it increasingly complex to give these companies the benefit of the doubt.


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