The United States hosted a historic event in the early days of 2021. Supporters of the previous US President Donald Trump stormed the US Congress with guns in their hands.
After the incident in question, Donald Trump was banned from all platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. Today, a surprise move came from Meta to Trump’s ban.
Meta unbans Donald Trump:
In a blog post, Meta announced that the ban on Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram account will be lifted in the coming weeks. The company stated that if Donald Trump breaks the policies again, additional bans from 1 month to 2 years may be placed depending on the extent of the violation.
Nick Clegg, Meta’s Vice President of Global Affairs, explained the rationale for their decision on Trump as follows:
“As a general rule, we do not want to get in the way of public and democratic discussions on Meta platforms, especially in the context of elections in democratic societies such as the United States. The public should be able to hear their politicians say good, bad and ugly so that they can make informed choices at the ballot box.”
A new policy change was also announced on Facebook and Instagram:
The news of the lifting of the Donald Trump ban came as Meta made a new policy change across all platforms. With the updated protocol, Meta will interfere in a different way with posts that do not violate the policies but destroy the legitimacy of an election (such as QAnon and January 6 posts).
Such posts will be prevented from appearing in front of more users. On the other hand, the posts will continue to be seen by the person who shared it. In other words, a secret ban will be applied to the posts.
Donald Trump also made a statement:
Sharing a statement on his own social media application, Truth Social, Donald Trump made the following statements:
“FACEBOOK, which has lost billions of dollars since your favorite President ‘deplatformed’ me, has just announced that they will be reinstating my account. THANK YOU TO TRUTH SOCIAL FOR DOING SUCH AN INCREDIBLE JOB.”
Why was Donald Trump banned?
After the January 6 events, Donald Trump was banned from all platforms on the grounds of “inciting violence and praising the actions of the rebels”. Applications such as Facebook and Instagram under the umbrella of Meta were among the first platforms to implement this ban.
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