Users report pro-Democrat and anti-Republican hashtags blocked, Meta says a fix is incoming

As soon as Donald Trump took office as the President of the United States on Monday, Instagram users noticed something unusual. According to multiple reports, Instagram did not show any results for search terms like #Democrats or #Democrat or anything perceived as anti-Republican. Instead, users were met with a message stating, "We've hidden these results." This glitch caused a huge uproar, with many accusing the Meta-owned platform of political bias, particularly since the issue surfaced shortly after President Donald Trump's inauguration.

Many users turned to Reddit and other social media platforms to highlight the issue. One user by the Reddit name WhitePeopleTwitter shared that searching for #Democrats or #Democrat did not produce any results, but claimed that pro-Republican hashtags were working just fine.

A Reddit user in Australia also confirmed that Instagram was blocking search results related to the hashtag #Democrat. Similarly, users in Germany, Spain, and other parts of Europe reported hashtags like #Trumpflation, #kamala, etc., weren't producing any results. One Redditor compiled a list of hashtags reportedly being blocked by Instagram, including:

• "#berniesanders"
• "#queer"
• "#obama"
• "#voteblue" (#votered remains unaffected)
• "#dnc" (#rnc remains unaffected)
• "#fucktrump" (#fuckbiden remains unaffected)
• "#democrat" (#republican remains unaffected)
• "#kamala"
• "#prochoice"
• "#constitution"
• "#reproductiverights"
• "#jan6th"
• "#insurrection"
• "#14thamendment "
• "#republicans" (with an s)
• "#fascism"
• "#liberal"
• "#rightwing"
• “#georgeconway”
• “#domesticterrorist”
• “#jacksmith”
• “#drumpf”
• “#johnoliver”

While some users accused Meta of intentionally suppressing political content, social media expert Matt Navarra believes it is likely a technical error. Speaking to BBC, Navarra said, "In a hyper-partisan environment, even unintentional errors like this can escalate into accusations of partisanship. If these issues are not resolved quickly they risk fueling conspiracy theories and damaging Meta's reputation." Interestingly, while searches for democrats or related terms did not yield any result, typing #Republican produced over 3.3 million posts.

In our testing at the time of writing this article, the #democrat hashtag still did not produce any result, while the #republican hashtag worked fine.

Meta confirmed that they are addressing the problem and stated, "We're aware of an error affecting hashtags across the political spectrum and we are working quickly to resolve it."

It is noteworthy that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg did change his stance on Trump, including attending Trump's inauguration and donating $1 million to his fund. Meta CEO also made some changes to his platform policies. One significant move was appointing Joe Kaplan, a prominent Republican, as the President of Global Affairs for Meta, replacing ex-Liberal Democrat leader and former UK Deputy PM, Nick Clegg.