The social media firm Meta said the former US president’s suspension will end “in the coming weeks”.
via: NBC News
Former President Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts are being reinstated, the social media giant Meta announced Wednesday — a little more than two years after he was suspended from the platforms over incendiary posts about the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.
Trump’s accounts will be reinstated “in the coming weeks” with “new guardrails in place to deter repeat offenses,” Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, said in a statement. Meta owns Facebook and Instagram.
The guardrails will include “heightened penalties for repeat offenses — penalties which will apply to other public figures whose accounts are reinstated from suspensions related to civil unrest under our updated protocol,” Clegg said on the company’s website. “In the event that Mr. Trump posts further violating content, the content will be removed and he will be suspended for between one month and two years, depending on the severity of the violation.”
Trump celebrated the announcement on his social media platform, Truth Social.
“FACEBOOK, which has lost Billions of Dollars in value since ‘deplatforming’ your favorite President, me, has just announced that they are reinstating my account. Such a thing should never again happen to a sitting President, or anybody else who is not deserving of retribution!” he wrote.
Asked why Meta was reinstating Trump despite recent inflammatory posts on Truth Social, Clegg said the company wanted to tread lightly on censorship concerns.
“We’re not trying to kind of, you know, censor everything that everyone says in an open and free democracy,” Clegg said in an interview with NBC News’ Hallie Jackson. “We think that open and free debate on the rough and tumble of democratic debate should play out on Facebook and Instagram as much as anywhere else.”
Clegg contended that Meta has demonstrated a willingness to “draw a very sharp line,” knowing that what is posted on Facebook and Instagram can lead to real-world harm, and that it “will act, and we have acted.”
Asked whether an effort by Trump to delegitimize an election by lying about it would lead to another suspension, Clegg suggested that it would not, unless it clearly led to “imminent and real-world harm.” Instead, he said, the company would “take action to restrict the circulation of that content.”
Meta lifted Trump’s suspension weeks after the time frame Facebook gave itself to re-evaluate the 2021 ban and shortly after Republicans — many of whom have criticized Facebook’s decision — regained control of the House.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., then the minority leader, vowed to “rein in big tech power over our speech” after Facebook announced the length of Trump’s suspension in 2021.
