The former president of the United States Donald Trump will not be readmitted on Facebook e Instagram. The decision, which came after the banning from all the major social media decided last January, two days after the assault on Congress conducted by its fans, was taken by the Oversight Board, the ethical tribunal composed of 20 jurists, activists of the human rights, journalists and politicians (there is also the former premier of Denmark Helle Thorning-Schmidt) appointed by Mark Zuckerberg’s company to judge the controversial cases of content censorship that the company refused to put online as unacceptable.
The board confirmed the Menlo Park ban, but gave it to the giant six months to complete the review of the case, update its rules and justify any indefinite suspension, which had not been adequately explained. Facebook had in fact limited itself to saying that the president’s accounts would be blocked for an undefined period of time and there is no platform rule that provides such treatment.
The former president had meanwhile taken precautions by inaugurating, just on the eve of Facebook’s decision, his own new blog – From the Desk of Donald Trump – which should become his new megaphone, albeit far more limited in scope than those lost, from Twitter to YouTube. For now, the blog is just a collection of press releases issued in recent days to publicize the republican leader’s sorties. A less ambitious initiative than those that had been hypothesized in the past: from a social network entirely managed by the family tribe of The Donald to the birth of a personal television network of Trump.
Trump and social networks: for further information
Even if it will be followed by many Trumpians, the blog will never have the resonance of networks like Facebook with its 2.7 billion users. Trump spokespersons argue that this is only the first step in the former president’s new communication strategy, but there are also those who think that the real purpose of the initiative is to groped to reach Twitter and Facebook thanks to the side game of Trumpian activists who may share blog content on their social media accounts. The Twitter spokesperson warns that sharing is allowed, but only within the rules of the platform: yes to comments, no to the simple retransmission of Trump’s messages. It would be a way of circumventing the company’s service rules.
For this now the biggest game was that of Facebook: the Zuckerberg company, after refusing for years to intervene on the contents placed on the network, has anxiously introduced various layers of control and selection, responding to the pressure of Congress, public opinion, advertisers and its same employees. The result was a fragmented system with unclear rules and partly automatic controls, entrusted to artificial intelligence, partly managed by 15,000 contractors hired as moderators.
The uncertain rules and the many often incomprehensible complaints (there are those who have been suspended for a few days by Facebook for having defined citizens who oppose a partial cancellation of the university debt of students as gloomy egoists) have already rained down on the newborn Oversight Board as many as 220,000 appeals. The organization, paid for and managed by Facebook, arouses a lot of distrust but so far in the few cases in which it has expressed itself has almost always given the applicants right and the company wrong.
May 5, 2021 (change May 5, 2021 | 16:42)
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