The company Meta announced tonight (Thursday) that it will unblock the Facebook and Instagram accounts of the former President of the United States Donald Trump. The accounts will be back up and running in a few weeks. Meta’s president for global affairs, Nick Clegg, claimed that “the public should be able to hear what their politicians say so that they can make informed choices at the ballot box.”
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According to him, Trump’s suspension “was an extraordinary decision made under extraordinary circumstances. Now that the time period of the suspension has passed, the question is not whether we choose to reinstate Trump’s accounts, but whether there remain such extraordinary circumstances that extending the suspension beyond the original two-year period is justified”.
However, Clegg noted that Trump will be subject to “increased penalties for repeated offenses”, which also apply to other public figures. If Trump violates the Community Guidelines again, the offending posts will be removed and he will be suspended for one to two months, depending on the severity.
“We know that any decision we make on this issue will be heavily criticized,” Clegg wrote. ″People will disagree if this is the right decision. But a decision had to be made, so we tried to do it to the best of our ability in a way that is consistent with our values and the process we established in response to the guidance of the Supervisory Board.”
Let’s recall that about two months ago Elon Musk announced the return of Trapp’s Twitter account to activity. You are following a survey on Twitter in which he asked the users of the platform whether the account should be restored to activity. The results showed that 51.8% of the 15 million respondents support Trump’s return to Twitter, while 48.2% oppose it.
“The people have had their say, Trump will return,” Musk tweeted following the results, adding the Latin phrase “Vox Populi, Vox Dei”, which means “the voice of the people is the voice of God”
However, Trump himself announced – and not for the first time – that he is not interested in this, and sees no point in doing so. “I see no reason for that,” he said during the Republican Jewish Council convention, emphasizing that he will continue to use his social network – Truth Social, while claiming that it is better than Twitter.
As you may recall, Facebook and Twitter made the unprecedented decision to block the president of the United States while in office from their platforms at the time, after determining that this outweighed the “risk of further incitement to violence”. However, Twitter chose a permanent block compared to Facebook which announced that it was a temporary suspension, and in the end defined a period of about two years until it reviewed the decision.
Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have previously removed or flagged certain posts by the president that they deemed harmful before ultimately choosing to block his account.