(OPINION) Tucker Carlson has over 3.7 million followers on Instagram. On X, he has nearly 13 million followers. While his following on X is likely far more significant because it is the ostensibly less censorious platform where Carlson routinely uploads episodes of his new show, there may be another reason to account for the delta.
Ashton DeGroot, Blaze Media‘s social media content coordinator, observed Monday that following Carlson is no easy feat on the Meta platform.
A perfunctory search for Carlson failed to turn up his verified account. Instead, impersonators and fan accounts flooded the results. After multiple tries, it appeared clear that Carlson’s verified account would only appear if his exact handle, @TuckerCarlson, was entered into the search bar.
Upon finding Carlson’s account, DeGroot found that Instagram put up one last barrier to engagement, imploring prospective followers to reconsider.
The pop-up reads, “Are you sure you want to follow tuckercarlson?”
“This account has repeatedly posted false information that was reviewed by independent fact-checkers or it went against our Community Guidelines,” added the pop-up.
Blaze News did not encounter similar warning messages when test-following the accounts of various liberal personalities and publications, which have been outed peddling falsehoods and manufactured narratives.
The question is not, for instance, posed to potential followers of Newsweek, despite its loose relationship with the truth. Just last month, Newsweek falsely reported that Tucker Carlson had partnered with a Russian state-owned news channel, when in fact the outlet had effectively appropriated footage of Carlson’s without legal permission.
Users will not similarly encounter this warning when attempting to follow Jussie Smollett, who lied incessantly about being attacked by Trump supporters in Chicago when in fact he had paid two Nigerian-born brothers to stage a fake hate crime.
“I have never seen this warning before on any account,” DeGroot told Blaze News. “I was following a lot of people for [a Blaze Media account], and out of the 100+ that I followed, Tucker was the only one for whom this came up.”
