Meta has removed any remaining restrictions around Donald Trump‘s Facebook and Instagram accounts ahead of the Republican convention next week.
In an update to his January 2023 blog post in which Facebook ended the former president’s two-year suspension in the wake of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Meta’s global affairs president Nick Clegg stated Friday that with the Republican and Democratic national conventions coming up — the RNC kicks off on Monday while the DNC begins on Aug. 19 — both parties’ presidential candidates will be formally nominated.
“In assessing our responsibility to allow political expression, we believe that the American people should be able to hear from the nominees for president on the same basis,” Clegg wrote. “As a result, former President Trump, as the nominee of the Republican Party, will no longer be subject to the heightened suspension penalties.”
Clegg went on to assess the penalties themselves.
“In reaching this conclusion, we also considered that these penalties were a response to extreme and extraordinary circumstances, and have not had to be deployed,” he stated. “All U.S. presidential candidates remain subject to the same community standards as all Facebook and Instagram users, including those policies designed to prevent hate speech and incitement to violence.”
The move comes after Trump’s Facebook and Instagram access was restored in 2023, with Clegg calling the ban, “an extraordinary decision taken in extraordinary circumstances.”
“The normal state of affairs is that the public should be able to hear from a former President of the United States, and a declared candidate for that office again, on our platforms,” Clegg wrote at the time. “Now that the time period of the suspension has elapsed, the question is not whether we choose to reinstate Mr. Trump’s accounts, but whether there remain such extraordinary circumstances that extending the suspension beyond the original two-year period is justified.“
At the time, Clegg said that the company was putting “guardrails” in place, including heightened penalties, such as automatic suspensions, if Trump encourages violence again. For content not overtly violent but that delegitimizes elections, Facebook may stop the reach of those posts or revoke some advertising tools for Trump’s account.
Trump was banned from Facebook “indefinitely” on Jan. 7, 2021, with the company’s oversight board deciding in May of that year that it was justified in suspending his account “given the seriousness of the violations and the ongoing risk of violence.” But the board added, “it was not appropriate for Facebook to impose an ‘indefinite’ suspension.” So Facebook settled on a two-year ban with Clegg saying the company would re-evaluate in 2023.
Trump, who now has his own social platform that he seems to favor, Truth Social, also had his account on Twitter (now known as X) restored by that social media network’s owner Elon Musk, based on the results of an online poll Musk conducted.
