Did Instagram and its parent company, Meta, force users to follow Vice President JD Vance and President Donald Trump? No, that's not true: The accounts in question are reserved for the sitting vice president and president, respectively. Ownership was transferred to the leaders shortly after they assumed office.
The claim appeared in a post on Instagram on January 21, 2025. The narrator in the reel, who compared Vance's appearance to that of the horror film franchise character Chucky, opened:
So one of my supporters just let me know that Instagram has forced us -- me anyway, you might want to check your Instagram -- to follow Chucky [JD Vance].
This is what the reel looked like on Instagram at the time of writing:
(Source: Instagram screenshot taken on Wed Jan 22 16:08:59 2025 UTC)
The account in question is found at @vp on Instagram. Lead Stories looked at previous, archived versions of the @vp account. On the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, the oldest archived instance of the account was from April 16, 2014, during the vice presidency of former President Joe Biden. At that time, the bio of the account read:
Vice President Joe Biden This account is run by the Office of Vice President Biden. Instagrams from the Vice President are signed -vp. Comments may be archived WH.gov/privacy
Each subsequent vice president was featured on the account. The Wayback Machine briefly shows visual evidence of the accounts being utilized by former Vice President Mike Pence, as shown below:
(Source: Wayback Machine screenshot taken on Wed Jan 22 17:05:18 2025 UTC)
Another archiving website, Ghost Archive, shows that the @vp Instagram account was used by former Vice President Kamala Harris (archived here), as shown below:
(Source: Ghost Archive screenshot taken on Wed Jan 22 17:13:39 2025 UTC)
Therefore, if users were already following the @vp account, they would continue to follow it even if the vice president changed. Users can unfollow the account at their discretion.
Other posts on social media (for example, here and here) similarly stated that users were forced to follow President Donald Trump via the Instagram @potus account. Again, the @potus account is afforded to the sitting president, with archive.ph showing that Biden also used the account.
In a post (archived here) made on X and published on January 22, 2025, Meta communications director Andy Stone wrote:
People were not made to automatically follow any of the official Facebook or Instagram accounts for the President, Vice President or First Lady. Those accounts are managed by the White House so with a new administration, the content on those Pages changes.
Lead Stories contacted Instagram and its parent company, Meta, for more information. We will update this story with any relevant response.
At the time this was written, AP News had reviewed the same claim.
More Lead Stories fact checks related to claims about JD Vance and Donald Trump can be found here and here, respectively.
(Editors' Note: Meta is a client of Lead Stories, which is a third-party fact checker for the social media platform. On our About page, you will find the following information:
Since February 2019 we are actively part of Meta's partnership with third party fact checkers. Under the terms of this partnership we get access to listings of content that has been flagged as potentially false by Meta's systems or its users and we can decide independently if we want to fact check it or not. In addition to this we can enter our fact checks into a tool provided by Meta and Meta then uses our data to help slow down the spread of false information on its platform. Meta pays us to perform this service for them but they have no say or influence over what we fact check or what our conclusions are, nor do they want to.)
