A day after the January 6, 2021, insurrection, when a crowd of his followers stormed the US Capitol in Washington to prevent the certification of his electoral loss to Joe Biden, Facebook banned Trump.
Two years after he was barred because of the 2021 US Capitol uprising, social media juggernaut Meta stated on Tuesday that it would shortly reinstate former president Donald Trump’s accounts on Facebook and Instagram with “new guardrails.”
According to a statement from Meta’s president of global relations, Nick Clegg, “we will be reinstating Mr. Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts in the coming weeks,” with “additional guardrails in place to avoid repeat breaches.”
Clegg says that the Republican leader, who has already said he wants to run for president in 2024, could now get a suspension of up to two years for each rule he breaks.
Requests for comments from Trump’s people were not answered right away, so it was not clear when or if he would return to the platforms.
The 76-year-old business tycoon, though, replied in his customary brash manner, boasting that Facebook had lost “billions of dollars in value” while he was away.
He declared on his Truth Social platform that “Such a thing should never again happen to a sitting president, or anybody else who is not deserving of retaliation!”
A day after the January 6, 2021, insurrection, when a crowd of his followers stormed the US Capitol in Washington to prevent the certification of his electoral loss to Joe Biden, Facebook banned Trump.
The former reality TV star lied for weeks that the presidential election was fixed against him. As a result, he was impeached for starting the trouble.
Trump’s attorney, Scott Gast, said last week that Meta had “dramatically distorted and limited the public conversation” in a letter asking for the ban to be lifted.
He requested a meeting to talk about Trump’s “rapid reinstatement to the platform” of Facebook, where he had 34 million fans, claiming that the ban should be lifted because he was the front-runner for the Republican nomination in 2024.
The head of the American Civil Liberties Union, Anthony Romero, said that Meta made “the right decision” by letting Trump back on the social network.
Romero stated in a release that “like it or not, President Trump is one of the nation’s foremost political personalities, and the public has a significant interest in hearing his speech.”
In fact, some of Trump’s most offensive posts on social media were used as key evidence in lawsuits against him and his administration.
According to Romero, the ACLU has brought more than 400 lawsuits against Trump.
– Extremism producer?
But groups like Media Matters for America are strongly against letting Trump use Facebook’s social networking features.
Make no mistake, said Media Matters president Angelo Carusone, “by allowing Donald Trump back on its platforms, Meta is refilling Trump’s misinformation and extremism engine.”
In addition to having an effect on Instagram and Facebook users, this creates more problems for civil society and is an existential threat to American democracy as a whole.
In December, a US congressional committee suggested that Trump be charged with a crime for his involvement in the assault on the US Capitol.
After the violence, his 88 million-follower Twitter account was also suspended, forcing him to use Truth Social, where he only has less than five million followers, to communicate.
Trump’s use of social media and his massive digital reach were credited with contributing to his surprise victory in 2016.
A social media expert at the University of Florida, Andrew Selepak, said that Facebook doesn’t want to start a fight with Congressmen who support Trump and would definitely protest if he were kicked off the network.
Selepak said, “Trump needs the platform for fundraising, and Facebook doesn’t want to face Congress.”
While a group of Democrats in Congress this month pushed Meta to extend the ban to remove “dangerous and unsubstantiated election denial content off its platform,” conservative Republican leaders have railed over the removal of Trump from Facebook.
Days after Trump declared his intention to run for president again in November, Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, restored his account. He hasn’t yet posted.
