Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, will reinstate the Facebook and Instagram accounts of former President Donald Trump after a two-year suspension, according to Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg on the company website. The reinstatement is not without conditions, Clegg said, and may lead to further suspensions if platform policies are violated again.
Clegg said that when Trump was originally suspended in the wake of the January 6, 2021 Capitol breach, the Meta board did not like the open-ended nature of the suspension. At that time, two years was suggested as the suspension length. “The public should be able to hear what their politicians are saying — the good, the bad and the ugly — so that they can make informed choices at the ballot box,” Clegg wrote. “But that does not mean there are no limits to what people can say on our platform.” The conditions The board assessed that the risk presented by Trump being on the platform had receded, which was a condition of giving Trump another try.
Meta upgraded its protocols for violations by public figures prior to allowing Trump to return, and said that further violations will have even more severe penalties than other accounts would have. These updated protocols will apply to all public figures going forward. 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. For other content deemed harmful, Meta could restrict its distribution and/or shareability without removing it from the site entirely.
Trump celebrates
Trump celebrated the news of his reinstatement with a post on his own 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.
Clegg was asked by NBC News why Meta was reinstating Trump in the face of his Truth Social posts, some of which are inflammatory. “We’re not trying to kind of, you know, censor everything that everyone says in an open and free democracy,” Clegg said. “We think that open and free debate on the rough and fall of democratic debate should play out on Facebook and Instagram as much as anywhere else.” He said the line for removal is whether the post could cause “real-world harm.”
Not much hope
There’s not a lot of hope that Trump is going to be back on Facebook and Instagram for very long under these conditions, particularly when the left wants to define “harm” in entirely political ways at times. Big tech has shown too many times that it will cave to pressure from the left when it thinks Trump’s message might be succeeding with the people–even if his words are entirely factual. It doesn’t care about the truth, only about the success of its own narrative.
