Meta will return Donald Trump to Facebook and Instagram “in the coming weeks”, in a polarizing move that will give the former US president an important platform ahead of his 2024 bid for the White House.
Trump, whose use of social media helped him secure the presidency in 2016, has been suspended from the Meta platform for the past two years after praising a group of his supporters who attacked the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
However, the $371bn social media company will now allow them to return, saying it has put in place “new guardrails to prevent breaches”, according to its president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, who has overseen the decision.
“The public need to be able to listen to what politicians have to say so that they can make the right choices,” Clegg said.
The recovery could give Trump a new megaphone to reach his followers as he begins his 2024 presidential campaign, which has had a rocky start. The former president has 34 million and 23 million followers on his Facebook and Instagram accounts, respectively, although he is currently unable to post.
It is unclear if and when Trump, who has launched his own rival social media platform, Truth Social, will return. The account on rival Meta Twitter was restored in November by the new owner of the platform Elon Musk, but he has not yet posted.
“FACEBOOK, which has lost billions of dollars since ‘deplatforming’ your favorite President, me, has announced that they will restore my account,” Trump wrote on Truth Social after the announcement. “This kind of thing will never happen again to a sitting president, or anyone who doesn’t deserve to be punished.”
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung told Fox News Digital last week that Facebook is “an important tool for the 2024 campaign to reach voters through advertising, grassroots mobilization and fundraising”.
In 2021, Trump was suspended “indefinitely” a day after the Capitol riots because of what Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg described as his decision “to push a violent rebellion against a democratically elected government”.
The suspension was carried out by Meta’s supervisory board, a Supreme Court-style body made up of academics and outside experts who evaluate challenges to the company’s moderation decisions. However, the council took issue with the lifetime ban, ordering Meta to review its decision in two years.
Trump’s return to the platform will likely be welcomed by Republicans who argue that the social media platform has stifled free speech and deliberately targeted conservatives, the company argued.
However, Meta’s decision will anger Democrats and online safety experts who warn that Trump’s rhetoric could lead to real-world harm.
It comes as social media platforms continue to try to navigate how to handle controversial statements and requests from politicians and global leaders.
On Wednesday, Clegg said Trump faced “higher penalties” for future offenses. For example, if he posts content that violates the rules, he will be suspended “between one month and two years, depending on the severity of the offense”, Clegg said.
Meta may seek to limit the reach of posts by Trump that do not necessarily violate the rules but contribute “to the type of risk that occurred on January 6”, and prevent them from being shared, recommended or run as advertising, Clegg added. . This includes content that “delegitimises the upcoming election” or is related to QAnon, a pro-Trump conspiracy theory.
Clegg said Meta has assessed the situation, including “looking at the conduct of the 2022 US midterm elections, and expert assessments of the current security environment” to assess whether the public security risk has decreased since Trump’s initial suspension.
“Our determination is that the risk has been reduced enough, and that’s why we need to stick to the two-year timeline that we’re working on,” he said.