In a blog post on Wednesday, Nick Clegg, President of Global Affairs at Meta, declared that Donald Trump’s suspension on both Facebook and Instagram will be lifted. Former President Trump was suspended from both platforms, among others, after the occurrences on January 6th, in which hundreds of his supporters took to the U.S. Capitol building in protest of the 2020 election results.
Clegg states, “To assess whether the serious risk to public safety that existed in January 2021 has sufficiently receded, we have evaluated the current environment according to our Crisis Policy Protocol, which included looking at the conduct of the US 2022 midterm elections, and expert assessments on the current security environment. Our determination is that the risk has sufficiently receded, and that we should therefore adhere to the two-year timeline we set out. As such, we will be reinstating Mr. Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts in the coming weeks. However, we are doing so with new guardrails in place to deter repeat offenses.”
It should be noted that Facebook does not fact-check political candidates, per policy.
Trump’s campaign earlier this month sent a letter to Meta petitioning the company to unblock his Facebook account, a source familiar with the letter told CNN. He was also reinstated by Twitter in November of 2022 but has yet to post.
Donald Trump’s ability to use social media as an extremely effective campaign tool has both Democrats and rival Republicans worried about what this may spell for the 2024 elections. It’s also unknown what will become of Trump’s own platform, Truth Social, with the CEO, Devin Nunes, dispelling rumors that Trump is planning to ditch the platform in favor of Elon Musk’s new Twitter.
At the time of writing, Donald Trump has 87.8 million followers on Twitter, 34 million followers on Facebook, 23.3 million followers on Instagram, and only 4.78 million followers on Truth Social.
