Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, announced this Wednesday that it will lift the ban on Donald Trump "in the coming weeks."
The former president had been banned from both social networks for a little over two years, as a result of the attack on the Capitol and also of his behavior during the weeks between the presidential elections, which he lost to Joe Biden, and on January 6, 2021, a black day for American democracy in which a mob of its followers stormed Congress at the end of one of its rallies in Washington to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power.
“Our conviction is that the risk [represented by Trump] has decreased sufficiently,” said its president of Global Affairs, Nick Clegg, in a post on the Meta blog.
“For that reason, we will be reinstating Trump's Facebook and Instagram accounts in the coming weeks.
We will accompany this decision with new protection measures to discourage him from repeating his behavior ”.
Before the door was closed, Trump had the account with the most followers on Facebook.
He was also fired from Twitter, a platform on which he earned the nickname of "tweeter in chief" during his presidency, but at that club they had already re-admitted him at the end of the year, after the magnate Elon Musk bought the social network.
At the moment, the former president has not used one of his favorite speakers again: following his expulsion from Twitter, he created his own social network, Truth Social.
With the latter, he binds her to an exclusivity contract, which obliges her to share his messages for at least six hours before running to do it elsewhere.
In addition, he invested in it, and everything suggests that if he stopped using it in the way he has done up to now, the company's value would plummet irretrievably.
“The public should be able to hear what their politicians are saying, the good, the bad and the ugly, so that they can make informed decisions at the polls,” Clegg, who was deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom at the time, added in his statement on Wednesday. by David Cameron in Downing Street.
“But that doesn't mean there aren't limits to what people can say on our platform.
When there is a clear risk of harm in the real world, a deliberately high bar for Meta to intervene in public discourse, we act."
It is not clear if Trump, who in November announced his third candidacy for the White House for the 2024 elections, intends to resume his activity on Facebook and Instagram, powerful platforms to spread his campaign messages.
The terms of your exclusive contract with Truth Social, contained in a document registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), include a proviso for cases in which the messages have to do with fundraising or with initiatives to promote voting.
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