Trump and Facebook
From Facebook:
Last month, the Oversight Board upheld Facebook’s suspension of former US President Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts following his praise for people engaged in violence at the Capitol on January 6. But in doing so, the board criticized the open-ended nature of the suspension, stating that “it was not appropriate for Facebook to impose the indeterminate and standardless penalty of indefinite suspension.” The board instructed us to review the decision and respond in a way that is clear and proportionate, and made a number of recommendations on how to improve our policies and processes.
We are today announcing new enforcement protocols to be applied in exceptional cases such as this, and we are confirming the time-bound penalty consistent with those protocols which we are applying to Mr. Trump’s accounts. 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.
A couple of observations:
Obviously, Trump supporters call this censorship, and in a very broad way, it is. When one body determines that someone else cannot say something, it is, by definition censorship. That said, there is nothing illegal or morally wrong about what happened here. The President of the United States used a private platform to commit a crime, in this case, inciting insurrection. The board of directors that governs the platform found that a) this violated the terms of agreement, and b) was proof that further crimes along this line could be committed in the future, hence banning him. Following this, an independent oversight board was formed, which came to the same conclusion.
2GreenEnergy is a social media platform whose user base is approximately four one-millionths the size of FB, and thus almost completely irrelevant to issues like inciting violence, and turning the United States into a fascist state. Regardless, readers have my promise that I will delete the account of anyone who uses 2GE to commit a crime (any crime). In fact, I’ve imposed this many times, as people with fraudulent business plans have tried to solicit investments here.
It’s common for people to bash FB for its lack of preparedness to remove Trump from FB. I happen to be sympathetic to their not being fully ready; who could have imagined that America would elect a sociopath as POTUS?
“(Trump) will be reinstated (onto FB) only if conditions permit.” Now that’s funny. Does anyone think Trump will somehow become a force of honesty, and will cease his tactic of using lies to inspire violence and hate?
It’s highly likely that by 2023, Trump will be either in self-imposed exile to avoid criminal prosecution or in federal prison. In any case, we can all hope that he’ll be irrelevant to U.S. politics at that point, and that this limited time penalty will be meaningless.
