Am I a conspiracy theorist?

One of Trump’s first actions as president this week was an Executive Order "restoring freedom of speech and federal censorship." He claimed that the previous government exerted “substantial coercive pressure” on social media companies to moderate, de-platform or suppress speech they did not approve of.

It was funny, then – or would have been funny if I still had a sense of humour about all this – when I woke up on Tuesday and saw chatter on social media about Meta blocking #Democrat and #DNC on Instagram. When I tried it out, I faced the same issue. But when I searched for #Republican or #GOP, the results were showing as normal.

By mid-afternoon, it was all over the news. When we asked Meta about what was going on, they said “We’re aware of an error affecting hashtags across the political spectrum and we are working quickly to resolve it.”

After this I was able to access all the hashtags. But my coworkers were getting different results, from both hashtags being blocked to recommendations coming up for one but not the other. 

There were discrepancies on other search terms too. One colleague found  #prochoice was blocked, while #prolife was working fine. You can view a list of other blocked left-leaning hashtags compiled by one Reddit user here.

Most blocks I came across did seem skewed towards the right, but this wasn’t exclusively the case. Another colleague found #energyemergency was blocked, but #climatecrisis working fine.

This could suggest it really was just a very unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on who you speak to) timed glitch, hindering large numbers of people from accessing information during a massive news event.

But let’s also not forget that from women’s bodies to Palestine, this is not exactly the first time Meta has explained away censorship on its platforms as a mistake or technical error. We also know from a recent investigation by Taylor Lorenz that for months, Instagram has been blocking teens from searching for LGBTQ+ hashtags.

With this, on top of Mark Zuckerberg’s recent right-wing and Trump allied appointments, donation to the new President's inauguration fund, depletion of content moderation and scrapping of fact checking, you’d be forgiven for not buying Meta’s response.

You’d also be forgiven for panicking, as many did, that your Facebook account suddenly followed Donald Trump, Melania Trump and JD Vance without your consent.

Meta has stated that users were not forced to follow these pages though, explaining that official White House accounts like POTUS transfer from one President to the next. An explanation of the transferral process published by Former President Obama’s office in 2016 says the same thing.

What’s less clear is why some people appear to be struggling to unfollow or block these new official accounts after they have been transferred. Meta has acknowledged this is an issue, telling Cosmopolitan UK “It may take some time for follow and unfollow requests to go through as these accounts change hands," but has given no further explanation.

After responding to our initial requests, Meta did not address our query about claims by some users that their follow could not have been transferred because they were not following these accounts during the previous administration. I also just wish they’d say who called Trump’s page ‘Eagle 1600 2’ before it was changed to his new title 😎

Of course, this could all be a glitch too. The problem is, when our own reality is becoming so glitchy, it's harder and harder to distinguish reality from conspiracy. After all, conspiracies are birthed from lack of trust in institutions – and those governments and corporations actually doing things which sound like conspiracies.

After Trump’s victory in November, I wanted to know what impact his stance on Big Tech was going to have on digital rights around the world. It’s a fair question, I guess. But I should have thought more about what changes the Tech Bros would just go ahead and make themselves, before Trump had even stepped foot in the White House.

Since then, Zuckerberg has ended Meta’s fact-checking programme in the US, changed the company’s hate speech policy to permit referring to LGBTQ+ people as mentally ill and women “as household objects or property”, and rolled back its in-house diversity programmes.

Meanwhile, Musk’s extremism is making headlines daily, from using X to platform far-right actors in Germany and the UK to making a Nazi-style salute at the inauguration this week.

This is why the concept of Meta censoring Democrat or progressive content, while pushing Trumpian accounts, doesn’t actually feel out of the question at this point. But even if these glitches were just glitches, we know they stopped some of us from viewing content from both sides of US politics. They will also have further eroded public trust in Meta platforms. 

All of this is to say: surely it’s time to reclaim the internet from the billionaire Tech Bros by ending their monopoly power and decentralising social media? Or maybe I’m just a conspiracy theorist.

Did you struggle to view any hashtags on Instagram or Facebook this week? Did you find yourself unable to unfollow or block the POTUS, FLOTUS, Vice President – or other pages – on these platforms? Are you considering leaving Meta or other Big Tech platforms following recent developments?

Send us your stories and screenshots on Bluesky or Instagram (yes, we appreciate the irony) or email bigtechstories@the-citizens.com so we can continue looking into this! 🧐

Shivani Dave contributed to reporting.