One Reddit user wrote in the Facebook subreddit: “Never once have I followed any Trump or White House pages. My feed is now filled with the official posts.”

Another user on Facebook noted, “All of a sudden, I was following Donald and his wife on Facebook. Everyone check your page because a few people are saying the same thing, and I sure as hell have never looked at their pages. Hoping I took care of that problem.”

On the Millenials subreddit, user Piper_Dear wrote, “Facebook made my profile auto-follow Trump,” adding that they were unable to unfollow the pages.

However, in some cases, users may be referring to the president’s account, which updates to the new president following the inauguration, rather than Trump’s account. This means that if users were following the president's account under Biden, it would have been transferred to Trump, which is also true for the accounts of the vice president and first lady. However, this issue did not happen when Trump lost to Biden and this does not explain all the cases moaned about on Reddit.

Meanwhile, it seems there is a problem on Instagram where users receive a “results hidden” message when searching for terms related to the Democrats. Meta says that it is working to resolve the issue. Still, some users across social media have accused Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, of political bias, pointing to the fact that the issue arose following Trump’s inauguration on Monday.

Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg attended the inauguration and some surrounding events.

Meta insists that the problem is a technical problem affecting other hashtags, including a Republican tag.

Social media expert Matt Navarra told the BBC that the incident was still “embarrassing” for Instagram.

“In a hyper-partisan environment, even unintentional errors like this can escalate into accusations of partisanship,” he said. “If these issues are not resolved quickly, they risk fuelling conspiracy theories and damaging Meta’s reputation”.