On 14th February, the official “White House” Instagram page posted a special Valentine’s Day message: “Roses are red, violets are blue, come here illegally and we’ll deport you.”
Four days later, the account posted an “ASMR” video (a popular genre of online videos featuring relaxing sounds) of an “illegal alien deportation flight”, replete with the sounds of chains jangling as deportees walked the stairs to their outbound plane. The top comment, which received almost double the number of likes as the post itself, called the video “the most absurd, inhumane, embarrassing, and downright disturbing thing I have seen in a while.”
Since Trump retook the White House, the tone of the official @potus and @whitehouse Instagram accounts has shifted from statesmanlike to outright trolling. Trump’s communications team seems intent on antagonising the platform’s predominantly liberal base. As one prominent user put it: “Looks like @whitehouse is officially a ragebait meme account now.”
This comes as Mark Zuckerberg, owner of Instagram’s parent company Meta, has publicly cosied up to Trump and announced a loosening of the company’s moderation policies, a longtime bugbear of Maga conservatives. After X owner Elon Musk shifted his politics to the extreme right and promoted “free speech” over moderation, left-leaning users left X in droves. Now that Zuckerberg is following a similar path, might liberal users of Meta’s platforms also jump ship?
Instagram is the only Meta platform on which such an exodus could metastasise. The user base of Facebook, the company’s largest platform, is older and generally less plugged into the zeitgeist. Meta’s other major platform, WhatsApp, is more functional and focused on family, friends and work. There are fewer loud progressive voices on either platform to lead an exodus.
Instagram’s users, meanwhile, are solidly millennial, a demographic that tends to the left politically. Keeping up with news is not the main reason they use the platform, but those topics are certainly part of the ecosystem. Instagram boasts the second-largest number of “news influencers” of any social media, behind only X. And more users who encounter political content report that its users tend to be liberal (25 per cent, compared to just 7 per cent who say it skews conservative). Data from the now defunct analytics platform CrowdTangle—which Meta shut down in August last year—confirmed that Instagram’s content generally contains progressive sentiment, with topics such as climate change and Black Lives Matter ranking among some of the platform’s most popular themes over time.
In X’s case, it wasn’t just the ideological gulf between the platform’s owner and many of its users that catalysed some to take flight, but controversial platform changes too. Now that Zuckerberg has pledged to scrap third-party fact-checking and roll back hate speech protection—which included allowing users to refer to trans people as having a “mental illness”—he is taking a major risk. After the Meta CEO announced those changes in January, Google searches for how to delete Instagram spiked by more than 5,000 per cent.
Then came Trump’s reclamation of the official government accounts. Meta allowed Trump personally back onto its platforms in 2023, after suspending him in 2021 for his role in the 6th January riots. But when Trump was inaugurated on 20th January this year, many users were outraged to find themselves automatically following Trump and speculated that Zuckerberg was forcing users to follow him. In actuality, these users most likely followed the official “President of the United States” account while Joe Biden was in office.
Some users reported being unable to successfully unfollow the new Trump-owned account, with pop stars Gracie Abrams (4.9m followers) and Demi Lovato (153m followers) expressing viral outrage. Earlier, users had noted that, for a period after the inauguration, search results for “democrat” or “democrats” and the equivalent hashtags were hidden due to them being deemed “sensitive terms”. Meanwhile “republican” returned limited results but “republicans” appeared unaffected. These incidents were likely unintentional, but still they were noticed by users.
A Meta spokesperson attributed these issues to technical errors. Yet, with Meta’s algorithms not transparently available for scrutiny, users must take the company’s word for it. And how confident can Meta be that users take its word in good faith when other actions taken by the company seem so partisan? These include Zuckerberg donating $1 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration fund and appointing a prominent Republican as Meta’s new head of global policy.
The tension between Instagram’s executives and its millennial base seems likely to grow, not simply due to the increased presence of Trump, but because Meta’s recent policy changes will make content that users will find objectionable—like the White House’s recent trolling—more visible.
Over the last few years, Meta deprioritised “civic” content, particularly posts about politics. Progressive Instagram accounts were hit hardest by this change, enjoying an average 65 per cent less reach as a result. Meta is now reversing this position and vowing to show users more political content, which could provide a boost for left-leaning political influencers. But there are actually now more “news influencers” on the platform with conservative views, despite the broader popularity of liberal sentiments, who will also benefit from this boost.
Part of the original motivation for deprioritising “civic” content was commercial risk. Australia and Canada have recently passed laws to force tech giants to compensate news organisations for hosting their content. In Canada, Meta has banned news content entirely to avoid coughing up. Despite Zuckerberg turning on the “civic” tap again, it is highly doubtful he will be keen to pay more money to large media outlets in these jurisdictions, or to give others elsewhere any ideas. So the “civic content” Meta would probably elevate is likely to come from non-traditional news sources.
Meta is also planning to recommend more political content from outside a user’s network, not just those they already follow. Some might welcome this change as an antidote to insular online echo chambers. But this change will occur around the same time that Meta ditches its professional fact-checkers and relaxes its hate speech protections. The company has been vague on the timelines for both.
This means that Instagram users are probably about to encounter more Maga-inspired content in their feeds. Research shows right-leaning social media users are more likely to share misinformation, and Meta is now disarming itself of the professional means of combatting it.
If users leave Instagram, where will they go? The launch of a new app called Pixelfed in January may be keeping Zuckerberg up at night. It runs on a decentralised protocol, similar to X-rival Bluesky. And like Bluesky did for X, Pixelfed is designed to directly compete with and supplant Instagram’s functions.
If you don’t use Instagram, you might be wondering why all this matters. Last year Instagram surpassed Facebook in active users in Europe for the first time (Facebook still has more users, but many are inactive). This makes it all the more baffling that most mainstream media coverage of Meta’s policy changes has focused on Facebook.
When journalists do look to the future of social media, they understandably look at scandal-plagued TikTok and its burgeoning user base. But Instagram still has more active users worldwide. And if the ongoing ownership and regulatory issues with TikTok continue in the US, Instagram could benefit from a further uptick in users (Meta spent millions lobbying congress for the TikTok ban).
It’s time Instagram was understood as the political space it often is. There, among the gym selfies and holiday snaps, millions of users consume information that will inform their actions as citizens and voters. As this terrain becomes more fractious, more filled with misinformation, users may well start to miss the days when their feed mostly featured too-perfect photos of somebody else’s brunch.
