Meta has lifted the final restrictions on Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts in the run up to US presidential elections in November.
The ex-US president and convicted felon’s accounts were suspended in 2021 after he praised supporters who stormed the US Capitol on 6 January.
Trump’s accounts, which combined have over 60 million followers, were re-instated in 2023 but subject to additional monitoring, which has now been removed, the social media giant said in a blog post.
Meta said it had a responsibility to allow political expression and that Americans should be able to hear from presidential nominees on an equal basis.
I hate to say it, but they’re right. They can’t silence one of the two candidates for the presidency.
Yes they can. They are a private corporate and can do whatever they want as long as it doesn’t target a protected class, and it doesn’t.
And in particular, they didn’t silence him because of politics, but because he was conspiring with insurrectionists. Active treason. Stochastic terrorism.
Has he been convicted of that? We can all wring our hands as much as we want, and god knows I’m not a Trump supporter, but Facebook are not going to embroil themselves into a legal battle over this.
Facebook does not have nearly as high a burden of proof as a court of law.
Facebook most likely has a far larger budget for their legal team, too. I don’t think they’d be worried about a lawsuit.
They’ve convicted a hell of a lot of other people for it so far.
So Facebook is supposed to block the GOP presidential nominee because other people were charged of a crime and he was not? We’d all like that, but come on.
The problem is that it fundamentally makes them a political org to choose one side over the other. There are very strong arguments that insisting on “no political discussion” is an inherently conservative stance, but by allowing one candidate to speak but the other to not they are implicitly supporting the former.
And the US Government has made it clear that they don’t consider a violent insurrection to be treason. So why should facebook go to bat and make themselves an even bigger target come January?
No they didn’t. They prosecuted a LOT of people for that.
That’s the reason. Fuck Facebook’s own rules, they are trying to mitigate an attack by a fascist dictator.
And we just had a supreme court ruling that gives the ringleader immunity for anything he will ever do because he was POTUS for four years.
Individual users? Yeah, ban them because the law applies to them. Orange shitstain? There is no legal ground for him having commit treason so it is purely a decision by the moderation staff of a company who don’t want to get navy seals knocking on the door come January.
Yes. I said that was the reason. Glad we are in agreement.
And considering the American People would rather bicker over whether Biden is old than “holy fuck the nazis have a publicly available plan for how they are going to destroy the country”… when The People clearly won’t have your back, why fight on their behalf?
I would say that staging a coup definitively breaks the TOS.
Imagine pipping up to defend the non-existent “right” of a self declared fascist to spew his lies. 🤯
Careful not to choke on that boot…