Facebook and Instagram users delete accounts due to policy changes

After Meta and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a series of changes that shifted the company and its policies to the right ahead of President-elect Donald Trump’s second term, some users are fleeing the company’s platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

As part of changes in recent weeks, the company ended its third-party fact-checking program in the United States and announced it would forgo content moderation around political speech. Instead, Meta will use a community rating system similar to Elon Musk’s X. Updates to Meta’s hateful conduct policy include that LGBTQ people can now be labeled mentally ill based on their identity. Meta also disbanded its diversity, equity and inclusion team.

Zuckerberg is not the only Big Tech billionaire to curry favor with the new president. Both Musk and Jeff Bezos will be seated in prominent locations at Trump’s inauguration on Monday. But the changes to Meta, along with Zuckerberg’s personal appeals to Trump, caused a cascade of reactions among its users.

NBC News reviewed hundreds of posts and comments on various social media platforms indicating that users would delete their Meta accounts, stop posting or boycott the company in response to the changes. This exodus is reminiscent of the moment when users of X (formerly Twitter) left the platform in large numbers after the 2024 elections.

“I no longer feel safe posting on either platform as a queer Chicana woman,” said Marie Valencia, a full-time artist who had more than 20,000 followers on Facebook and Instagram before stop publishing. The term Chicana refers to American women of Mexican descent. “I’ve also seen a steady stream of people abandoning their profiles, especially over the past two weeks as Meta has dismantled DEI and voice protections for the most vulnerable people online.”

Valencia moved to publishing on Bluesky, an alternative to X, as well as a platform for Latina women called Amigahood. “Meta will become another X,” Valencia said.

Cord Jefferson, director of the Academy Award-nominated best picture film “American Fiction,” announced Sunday that he is leaving Instagram but will remain active on Tumblr.

“So many things are getting darker and grosser day by day. And while we can’t lay the blame for all of this at the feet of the tech oligarchs, we can lay the blame largely at the feet of the tech oligarchs,” Jefferson wrote on Instagram. “I’m doing what little I can to exclude from my life the increasingly stupid ideas that shape online spaces like this.”

Some people have abandoned some Meta platforms while continuing to use others. Mark Lemley, a law professor at Stanford University who represents Meta in copyright litigation involving artificial intelligence, announced Monday that he would drop the company as a client and reconsider its use of the platforms by Meta.

“I have struggled to respond to Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook’s descent into toxic masculinity and neo-Nazi madness,” Lemley wrote. “Although I’ve thought about leaving Facebook, I find great value in the relationships and friends I have here, and it doesn’t seem fair that I lose that because Zuckerberg is having a midlife crisis.”

Lemley said he has deactivated his account on Threads, Meta’s X alternative, and will no longer purchase products from ads he sees on Facebook or Instagram. Instead, he wrote that he would “go to the website separately to ensure Facebook gets no credit for the purchase.”

People leaving Meta still represent a small percentage of its overall user base. In the United States, almost 2 out of 3 people are on Facebook. There are almost 170 million Instagram accounts in the United States and almost 100 million accounts on WhatsApp. A week-long “Lights Out” boycott of Meta platforms starting January 19 attracted a few hundred likely participants in a Facebook group.

Some users have reported feeling trapped on Meta platforms, including WhatsApp, because they use these services to communicate with family members, friends and personal networks. Others have created platforms as influencers or for organizations and small businesses.

Stacy Kess, founder of the nonprofit news organization Equal Access Public Media, told NBC News she was “disheartened” to see other people and organizations in the disability community continue to post about Meta platforms after updating the hate conduct policy to allow calls. LGBTQ people with mental illnesses.

“I just saw so many people still actively posting on Instagram, and I was wondering how many of them knew about the policy change,” Kess said. “This should be a hard line for both disabled people and the LGBTQ community. »

Equal Access Public Media has accounts on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, which posted statements Tuesday regarding the policy change saying that “EAPM condemns this policy allowing dehumanizing and ableist language.” We will continue to publish elsewhere. The organization, which raises funds to produce information products accessible in video, audio, American Sign Language and simplified English, has its largest number of subscribers on Bluesky.

“We don’t feel like we’re taking a position of moral absolutism, we feel like we’re just living our values ​​and saying, ‘This is not OK,’” Kess said. “We will continue to explore other options because we know there are other options.”