Apparently Facebook wants everyone to follow Donald Trump now

The BBQ Pit
1

My cousin just posted that she got a notification on Facebook that Donald Trump changed his profile pic. “Why the fuck am I getting notifications from this rapist?” she wondered out loud to herself. She went to her profile, and sure enough, she now “follows” Donald J. Trump (shows her as “following” sing January 2025), even though she never did so.

So I went and checked my own list of pages I “follow,” and wouldn’t you fucking believe it? Mark Fucking Fuckerberg slipped this shit in on me too!

Anybody else have this happen to them today?

2

Upon reflection, I wonder if I was following a POTUS page, and now I have to unfollow because the new POTUS is a rapist insurrectionist whose shriveled orange face gives me the wet heaves.

ETA: Still doesn’t explain why it shows “Following since January 2025” if it’s a page belonging to the WH, and we had been following it prior to Trump’s taking office.

3

I just checked and I’m not following the Fanta Menace.

4

No, because I recognized early on that Facebook would be a complete shitshow of public manipulation and instigation of fermenting hatred. As soon as I saw corporations and political interests co-oping Facebook for their own purposes, I maintained an unyielding person firewall, refusing to even open links to Facebook.

Are you following the official White House Facebook page or Donald Trump’s personal page? Regardless, it is clear that the algorithms of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, et cetera are going to be shoving pro-Trump and pro-MAGA content at you going forward. And I give Bluesky a period of no more than eight months before it starts following suit.

Stranger

5

Actually, I just went to unfollow The White House and found it to be “The Biden White House Archived.” So he didn’t take over the official White House FB page, even.

I looked up his profile and I am not a follower. So shrug.

6

I quit FB in 2021, but this shit doesn’t surprise me. Zuck, Elon, and Bezos need to be canceled hard and their respective companies taken down via boycott. (Confession: I still use WhatsApp but am willing to try a viable replacement. I still use Amazon, but apparently Juiced Baldman only owns 10% at this point, so I’m not sure if that’s enough to make me quit.)

7

Facebook is cordially invited to eat a steaming bowl of thinly sliced donkey testicles.

8

Big mistake. Leaving them whole makes them much tougher.

9

Depending on what functionality you’re trying to replicate, there’s Telegram and Signal for regular messaging. I stumbled across Zangi, but that seems to be mostly for scams. And, Pumble is a free alternative to Slack, if that’s the environment you’re trying for.

10

Really just want to message with friends. Like a chat app.

11

I thought I quit FB in 2016 after 10 years but it apparently was still active after that. I opened it up in 2022 to communicate with some cousins on Messenger.

How do you even locate who you are following? I am clueless with FB. I see a list of friends but nothing that says following.

Edit: I looked up how to find this on google and as usual it makes no sense. What they say I should see is not there. Google claims there is a Following section under my profile but there isn’t.

12

I’d also appreciate some guidance on that.

13

I have not been switched to Following.

14

Go to your profile. Click at the top, the drop down button that is beside “More”.
It will be as follows: Posts, About, Friends, Photos, Videos, Music, More
More is what you want.

Click the drop down arrow and go to “Likes”. This brings up many small sub categories of pages you have LIKED OR FOLLOWED…liking a page automatically follows it, so the two are fairly interchangable.

My cite is… me… someone who has been using FB daily for over 20 years now.

15

Go look at who your friends are. Once you get to that page there will be a tab at the top that says Following. Tap that and you can check.

I just checked mine and sure enough it had me as a follower. Not sure why unless it was some type of WH or POTUS page. I unfollowed immediately.

16

Read my post above… it should help you.
You can also search any page via the search engine on there and click on the page directly to see if it says “following” or not. If it does, you’re following it. If it doesn’t… wait for it… you’re not.

17

So I unfollowed it about a half hour ago. Then, I just went back to my news feed and there was a new post showing that Donald J. Trump has just posted something new. Went to the Trump page and, wtf, I’m following it again. So I went to my list of pages I follow and, yep, it shows I’m following him.

And fyi, it’s President Donald J. Trump, so it does seem to be the official POTUS page. Still doesn’t explain why it keeps showing up in my feed and why I can’t unfollow him.

Fuck you Zuck!

18

This was very helpful. I found a synagogue, pet sitting service, hardware store, coffee bean store, a band called Bail Jumpers, grocery store, a Virginia farmhouse market and my local library among several others. I was able to unfollow them successfully but they remain sitting there in thumbnail style pictures lol.

Then I got all excited about my little clean up project and hid some events that can’t unhide but no big deal because they are past.

Thank you!

But thankfully no presidential inserts from the incoming administration.

19

Is there an option to Block? That is one thing I have done successfully a few times on FB over the years.

20

On the top, right… when you’re ON, LOOKING AT THE PAGE itself. below “like” and “message”, you’ll find a button that just has three periods on it. Ellipsis. “…”

Click that, a drop down box shows up, one of them is “block”.