Facebook users who suddenly automatically follow the page of American Vice President JD Vance. Instagram posts from a prominent US abortion provider being censored. Search results for hashtags like #Democrats, #Biden and #Kamala being hidden. And this in the week that Donald Trump was sworn in as president for the second time, in the presence of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and others tech moguls. That couldn’t possibly be a coincidence, could it?
These examples have been circulating on social media in recent days. Many people, especially in the progressive corner, see them as evidence of political bias on the part of the American technology company Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram. After all, it comes shortly after Zuckerberg’s announcement that Meta will stop collaborating with fact-checkers and significantly scale back the moderation of misinformation and hate on its social platforms. This was widely interpreted as an attempt to curry favor with Trump.
Yet it is not clear whether the recent examples are really the result of increasing censorship on Facebook and Instagram in the wake of Trump’s return to the White House. Outsiders have insufficient insight into the tuning of Meta’s algorithms for this. The company itself insists that there is no political bias. According to Meta, the hiding of Democratic search results was due to a technical glitch that also affected other hashtags, including Republican ones.
Meta also denied other examples of alleged bias. “People were not automatically forced to use one of the official Facebook or Instagram accounts of the president, vice president or… first lady to follow,” spokesperson Andy Stone wrote on X. “Those accounts are controlled by the White House, so when a new administration takes office, the content of those pages will change. This is the same procedure we followed during the last presidential transition period.”
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Censoring content about the right to abortion also appears to have nothing to do with Trump’s return to the White House. Because since the Supreme Court struck down the nationwide right to abortion in 2022, major social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, are removing much more abortion-related content. “Instances where such content has been removed are often not well substantiated or appear to be a misapplication of the guidelines,” Amnesty International wrote in a report last year.
Removing certain (political) content is nothing new for Meta, says Lotje Beek, policy advisor at Bits of Freedom, an organization committed to digital civil rights. She doesn’t just point out abortion-related contentbut also on pro-Palestinian posts, for example, whose reach was severely curtailed by Meta after the outbreak of the Gaza war. “It is logical that Meta determines what is and is not allowed on its platforms. The problem is that censorship always offends groups, and especially affects vulnerable groups.”
The recent fuss about Meta’s alleged political bias seems to mainly arise from concerns about the oligarchy of tech moguls that is starting to emerge around Trump. This does not mean that the concerns are unfounded. “Recent events show how political social media platforms are,” says Beek. “Because they have a major influence on the social debate. The social media companies have always said that they are just a neutral conduit. But that is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.”