Meta said on Wednesday that it would reinstate Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts, which had been closed for two years.
The most popular social media site made it clear that Trump would have to follow its rules.
Why was Donald Trump suspended on Facebook?
Nick Clegg, president of global affairs at Meta, has said, “The normal state of affairs is that the public should be able to hear from a former President of the United States, and a declared candidate for that office again, on our platforms. Now that the time period of the suspension has elapsed, the question is not whether we choose to reinstate Mr. Trump’s accounts, but whether there remain such extraordinary circumstances that extending the suspension beyond the original two-year period is justified.”
After praising the people who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, Trump was banned from both Facebook and Instagram. The Facebook Oversight Board agreed with the decision, but it didn’t like that the ban would last forever. The ban was then put on hold for two years, and Meta said that public figures’ accounts could be shut down during times of violence or unrest. A plan was also made for how to act more quickly in a crisis.
Clegg said that after he looked at the threat to public safety and the current state of security, “the risk has sufficiently receded.”
So, we will bring back Mr. Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts in the coming weeks. Clegg wrote that new rules are being put in place so that the same thing doesn’t happen again.
Meta still strict on content policies
The Meta announcement came after Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, decided to bring back Trump’s account. But Trump hasn’t posted anything yet because he started Truth Social, his own social media site. Axios was the first to report that Facebook and Instagram were back online.
Clegg wrote that if Trump does something wrong, he will be punished more harshly.
“Many people believe that companies like Meta should remove much more content than we currently do,” Clegg said. “Others argue that our current policies already make us overbearing censors. The fact is people will always say all kinds of things on the internet. We default to letting people speak, even when what they have to say is distasteful or factually wrong.”
Trump often posts on Truth Social multiple times a day, but it doesn’t get nearly as much attention as his posts on the biggest platforms. He has kept saying, without evidence, that the 2020 election was rigged, and he has questioned the legitimacy of many investigations into his role in the attack on the Capitol.
He wrote a post on Truth Social about the Facebook choice. He wrote, “Facebook just told me that they are bringing back my account, which has lost billions of dollars in value since they “deplatformed” your favorite president, me. This should never happen again to the president in office or to anyone else who doesn’t deserve it. We should thank TRUTH SOCIAL for doing such a great job. Your growth is amazing, and the future is wide open for you.
Trump’s deal with Truth Social says that he is “generally required” to post there and can’t post the same thing on any other social media platform for six hours. But according to a filing he made with the SEC last year, he can post from any social media platform at any time as long as the content is about “political messaging, political fundraising, or efforts to get people to the polls.”
The board said in a blog post that the Meta Oversight Board had nothing to do with the decision. Even though it agreed that the company had made significant progress on implementing necessary and proportionate penalties across a range of violation severities,” it also asked for more information about its updated policies and how it decides whether allowed content still poses “a risk of offline harm.”
