Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced on Wednesday that it will restore former President Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts. This comes more than two years after both accounts were suspended following the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021.
“We will be ending the suspension of Mr. Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts in the coming weeks,” Meta said in a recent blog post. The company also noted that it has put “new guardrails in place to deter repeat offenses.”
Meta explained that the Jan. 6 attack at the U.S. Capitol immediately led to the indefinite suspension of Trump on both social platforms. At The same time, Trump was also kicked off of Twitter. Trump’s Twitter account, however, was reinstated in November after Elon Musk became the social media platform’s CEO. Trump has yet to post on Twitter and has remained solely on his own social platform, Truth Social.
While Trump’s accounts will soon be reinstated, Meta warned that it will ban the former president again if he posts any “further violating content.”
“In the event that Mr. Trump posts further violating content, the content will be removed, and he will be suspended for between one month and two years, depending on the severity of the violation,” Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, wrote in the blog post.
According to Reuters, the news was met with both praise and criticism from civil rights advocates.
“Facebook has policies, but they under-enforce them,” said Laura Murphy, an attorney who led a two-year-long audit of Facebook that ended in 2020. “I worry about Facebook’s capacity to understand the real-world harm that Trump poses: Facebook has been too slow to act,” she asserted.
Meanwhile, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and former ACLU official Jameel Jaffer defended the decision despite previously supporting Trump’s suspension.
“The public has an interest in hearing directly from candidates for political office,” Jaffer said. “It’s better if the major social media platforms err on the side of leaving speech up, even if the speech is offensive or false so that it can be addressed by other users and other institutions.”
Trump, who announced in November that he would be running for president again in 2024, responded to the news of his reinstatement by criticizing his prior suspension.
“Such a thing should never again happen to a sitting President, or anybody else who is not deserving of retribution!” he wrote on Truth Social.
Photo courtesy: ©Getty Images/Joe Raedle/Staff
Milton Quintanilla is a freelance writer and content creator. He is a contributing writer for Christian Headlines and the host of the For Your Soul Podcast, a podcast devoted to sound doctrine and biblical truth. He holds a Masters of Divinity from Alliance Theological Seminary.
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