Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts active again
- Technology
- February 11, 2023
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Former President Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts were reactivated Thursday after being suspended following the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, said it would not be making any statements on the matter.
The former president’s return to Facebook and Instagram — where he has a combined 57 million followers — comes as he launches his third presidential campaign. Meta didn’t issue a statement Thursday, but previously said there were “new guardrails” in place to prevent Trump from repeat offenders.
“Given his violations, he now also faces higher penalties for repeat offenders,” Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs, said in a blog post last month. “In the event that Mr. Trump posts further infringing content, the content will be removed and he will be banned for between one month and two years, depending on the severity of the violation.”
Meta initially suspended then-President Trump’s accounts indefinitely on Jan. 7, 2021 after posting praise for insurgents involved in violence in the US Capitol. The company then referred the decision to its newly formed oversight body, which upheld the decision but criticized the open nature of the suspension.
Then-President Donald Trump’s Twitter and Facebook accounts were suspended following the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol. Photo illustration by Omar Marques/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
In response, Meta said it would suspend Trump for two years from the original suspension and assess if he still poses a risk to public safety.
Trump has called Meta’s decision to suspend him from the platform an “insult” to his supporters and claimed the social media site was “censoring and silencing” him.
Last month, Trump’s campaign sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Clegg and Meta, asking the company’s top executives to meet to discuss Trump’s “immediate reinstatement on the platform.”
In the letter, seen by CBS News, Trump’s attorneys allege that an ongoing ban on Trump could be viewed by the platform as a deliberate effort by the company to “Mr. to silence Trump’s political voice.”
In response to the announcement, Trump said, “This should never happen to a sitting president or anyone else who doesn’t deserve retribution!” Trump has been using his own social media platform, Truth Social, for two years.
Around the same time that Trump was banned from Facebook, he was also banned from Twitter. But billionaire Elon Musk, who took over that platform in 2022, conducted a Twitter poll asking whether Trump should be reinstated, then reinstated his account in November 2022 according to the poll’s results.
At the time, Trump didn’t seem to indicate that he would return to Twitter, where he once posted multiple times a day. “I see no reason for it, they’ve got a lot of problems on Twitter, you see what’s going on. It can make it, it can’t make it,” he said shortly after Musk recovered his account. His last tweets on the platform are from January 2021.
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