Donald Trump will be allowed back on to Facebook and Instagram after Meta announced it would be ending its two-year suspension of his social media accounts.
The ban will end “in the coming weeks,” Meta said. In a statement, Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, said the public “should be able to hear what their politicians are saying.”
The former US president was indefinitely suspended from Facebook and Instagram after the Capitol riots in 2021.
The social media giant had acted following Trump’s “praise for people engaged in violence at the Capitol,” Clegg said. “The suspension was an extraordinary decision taken in extraordinary circumstances,” he added.
Clegg said a review had now found that Trump’s accounts no longer represented a serious risk to public safety. However, owing to Trump’s past, he would now face intensified penalties for any offences in the future.
Meta’s Oversight Board, a body it set up to review moderation rulings, said that the decision to reinstate Trump on its platforms “sat with Meta alone; the board did not have a role in the decision.”
The board had already informed Meta that a review of Trump’s suspension was necessary.
It encouraged Meta to be open and to offer more details about new laws protecting public figures so that it could assess how they were being applied.
