Donald Trump.Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty
Facebook announced Friday that it will revisitDonald Trump’s ban from the platform in 2023 and only reinstate him once the risk his conduct poses to the public “has receded.”
“The shocking events of the last 24 hours clearly demonstrate that President Donald Trump intends to use his remaining time in office to undermine the peaceful and lawful transition of power to his elected successor, Joe Biden,” Facebook founderMark Zuckerbergsaid at the time.
The board, which Facebook funds as a monitor on its decisions, ismade up of 20 members— mostly academics but also nonprofit leaders, journalists and the former prime minister of Denmark.
Their ruling prompted Facebook’s latest announcement, on Friday.
“We are today announcing new enforcement protocols to be applied in exceptional cases such as this, and we are confirming the time-bound penalty consistent with those protocols which we are applying to Mr. Trump’s accounts,” a company spokesmansaid in a blog post.
Never miss a story — sign up forPEOPLE’s free weekly newsletterto get the biggest news of the week delivered to your inbox every Friday.
“Given the gravity of the circumstances that led to Mr. Trump’s suspension, we believe his actions constituted a severe violation of our rules which merit the highest penalty available under the new enforcement protocols,” the spokesman continued. “We are suspending his accounts for two years, effective from the date of the initial suspension on January 7 this year.”
The company spokesman wrote that the length of the two-year ban was arrived at “to allow a safe period of time after the acts of incitement, to be significant enough to be a deterrent to Mr. Trump and others from committing such severe violations in future, and to be proportionate to the gravity of the violation itself.”
“At the end of this period, we will look to experts to assess whether the risk to public safety has receded. We will evaluate external factors, including instances of violence, restrictions on peaceful assembly and other markers of civil unrest,” the spokesman wrote. “If we determine that there is still a serious risk to public safety, we will extend the restriction for a set period of time and continue to re-evaluate until that risk has receded.”
The spokesman wrote that, if Trump returns to Facebook, “there will be a strict set of rapidly escalating sanctions that will be triggered if Mr. Trump commits further violations in future, up to and including permanent removal of his pages and accounts.”
In a statement, Trump called Facebook’s decision an “insult” to the people who voted for him and complained that “they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this censoring and silencing, and ultimately, we will win.”
On Friday, Facebook also announced what it said were other policy changes in response to the Oversight Board, including being more transparent about whom it exempts from content guidelines for being newsworthy.
Before the Capitol riots, some social media companies said Trump’s infamously divisive style was too newsworthy, as a politician, to be subject to strict moderation.
The board, in its May decision, also suggested Facebook, as a platform, may have had some role in the disinformation that fueled the Trump mob.
The company should “undertake a comprehensive review of Facebook’s potential contribution to the narrative of electoral fraud and the exacerbated tensions that culminated in the violence [at the Capitol],” the board said.
source: people.com
