Former President Trump will be allowed to return to Facebook and Instagram after a two-year ban for inciting violence during the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Facebook’s primary Meta platforms. announce Tuesday.
“The suspension was an extraordinary decision made in exceptional circumstances,” Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, said in a blog post. “The normal situation 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.”
The threat to public safety in January 2021 has “receded enough,” Clegg said, and Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts will be reinstated in the coming weeks with “new firewalls to deter repeat offences.”
The decision would allow Trump access to 23.3 million followers on Instagram and 34 million followers on Facebook as he seeks to return to the White House. he announce his 2024 presidential campaign in November, and his campaign formally petitioned Meta to reinstate his accounts in a letter to the company on Jan. 17, according to NBC News.
Trump was initially suspended from his Facebook and Instagram accounts on January 6, 2021, after the Meta determined that Trump had made multiple posts encouraging a mob insurrection at the U.S. Capitol while the 2020 electoral votes were being counted. After a review, the company’s oversight board imposed Six months to lift the suspension or make it permanent. Facebook answered By setting a two-year limit on Trump’s suspension, at which point he would “assess whether the risk to public safety has receded.”
This time, Trump will face increased penalties for violating Facebook or Instagram’s Community Standards based on the company’s protocols on restricting the accounts of public figures during civil unrest. Additional content that violates the Meta standards will result in a suspension from one month to two years, Clegg said, depending on the severity of the violation.
Since his removal from Meta platforms, Trump has been posting extensively on Truth Social, a social networking site he launched in February 2022.
“Facebook, which has lost billions of dollars in value since your favorite boss ‘knocked me off’, just announced it will reinstate my account,” he wrote on Wednesday. “Something like this should never happen again to a sitting president, or anyone else who doesn’t deserve revenge!”
Trump was too Recently restored to Twitter after it was banned in the wake of the January 6 attack, a decision Elon Musk made via a Twitter poll. He hasn’t posted anything on the platform since his account was reactivated.
Trump’s representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Facebook, a powerful networking and fundraising platform, played a major role in Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. In 2020, a senior executive wrote in an internal memo that Facebook’s advertising tools were responsible for Trump’s victory and expected it to lead to his re-election in 2020.
Facebook employees embedded with Trump’s 2016 campaign helped the team with its digital operations, providing free advice on advertising strategy and targeting, According to a study from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The company said the same services were offered to Hillary Clinton’s campaign as well as other non-political clients of major advertisers on its platform.
Separately, political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica claimed to leverage the private data of millions of Facebook users to guide Trump’s 2016 campaign strategy. The Trump campaign has denied using illegally acquired Facebook data.