Just over two years after Donald J. Trump’s accounts were suspended from Facebook and Instagram, Meta, the owner of the platforms, said on Wednesday that it would reinstate the former president’s access to the social media services, according to a New York Times report.
Trump, who had the most followed account on Facebook when he was barred, will “in the coming weeks” regain access to his accounts that collectively had hundreds of millions of followers, Meta said.
In November, Trump’s account was also reinstated on Twitter, which had barred him since January 2021, collectively giving the former president more of a megaphone as he campaigns for the White House in 2024.
Meta suspended Trump from its platforms on Jan. 7, 2021, the day after hundreds of people stormed the Capitol in his name, saying his posts ran the risk of inciting more violence. Trump’s accounts on other mainstream social media services, including YouTube and Twitter, were also removed that week.
But Meta, which critics have accused of censoring Trump and other conservative voices, said on Wednesday it had decided to reverse the bans because it had determined that the risk to public safety had “sufficiently receded” since January 2021.
The company added that it would add guardrails to “deter repeat offenses” in the future.
“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 choices at the ballot box,” said Nick Clegg, Meta’s president of global affairs. “But that does not mean there are no limits to what people can say on our platform.”
In a post on the right-wing social network Truth Social, Trump said a “de-platforming” should “never again happen to a sitting President, or anybody else who is not deserving retribution!”
Meta has been at the centre of a debate over free speech online and who should have the power to decide what can be posted and what needs to be removed.
The banning of Trump’s accounts was a stark demonstration of the clout of social media platforms and whether they have too much control and influence over public discourse online.
The coming reinstatement of Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts was immediately criticized by Democratic lawmakers and misinformation experts, who said the move would allow the former president to spread divisive and inflammatory posts.
“The Capitol community is still picking up the pieces from the Jan. 6 insurrection that Trump ignited, and now he is returning to the virtual scene of the crime,” Representative Jan Schakowsky, a chief deputy whip and a Democrat of Illinois, said in an email statement.
