Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts will be suspended for a two-year period until at least January 2023, at which point it will be reinstated “if conditions permit,” Facebook announced Friday. The former president’s Facebook-owned accounts were suspended on Jan. 7 after he praised rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol a day prior, citing the risk of violence if Trump were allowed to continue to use the platform. The move sparked a wave of other social media companies banning Trump, including Twitter.
An independent Facebook Oversight Board upheld the company’s suspension last month but required the social media company to review its decision and policies within six months. Facebook’s two-year ban against Trump for “severe violations” of its terms and services was deemed to be “long enough to allow a safe period of time after the acts of incitement, to be significant enough to be a deterrent to Mr. Trump and others from committing such severe violations in future, and to be proportionate to the gravity of the violation itself,” Nick Clegg, Facebook’s VP of global affairs, wrote in a blog post Friday.
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Clegg continued, “Given the gravity of the circumstances that led to Mr. Trump’s suspension, we believe his actions constituted a severe violation of our rules which merit the highest penalty available under the new enforcement protocols. We are suspending his accounts for two years, effective from the date of the initial suspension on January 7 this year.”
In January 2023, the board will “look to experts to assess whether the risk to public safety has receded” when it comes to possibly reinstating Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts. “If we determine that there is still a serious risk to public safety, we will extend the restriction for a set period of time and continue to reevaluate until that risk has receded,” Clegg wrote.
If Trump’s suspension is lifted in the future, Clegg said there will be a “strict set of rapidly escalating sanctions that will be triggered” if he “commits further violations in future, up to and including permanent removal of his pages and accounts.”
When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Trump’s initial suspension in January, he wrote that the president had been allowed to use the platform “consistent with our own rules” because of the belief that the “public has a right to the broadest possible access to political speech, even controversial speech.” Things changed, however, with the “use of our platform to incite violent insurrection against a democratically elected government.”
