Meta said it plans to restore Donald Trump's Facebook and Instagram accounts in the coming weeks.
The accounts were suspended soon after supporters of the former president stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
- In January, an attorney for Trump's 2024 presidential campaign submitted a formal request asking Meta to reopen the accounts, saying that the ban “dramatically distorted and inhibited the public discourse.”
- In a blog post on Wednesday, Meta said that it believed the risk to public safety posed by Trump's accounts had "sufficiently receded" since the Capitol riots.
- Meta’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, noted that the reinstatement of Trump's accounts does not mean "there are no limits to what people can say on our platform.”
- The decision to lift Trump's ban was criticized by Democratic lawmakers, including Illinois Rep. Jan Schakowsky, who said that “the Capitol community is still picking up the pieces from the Jan. 6 insurrection that Trump ignited."
- On the right-wing platform Truth Social, Trump wrote that a social media ban "should never again happen to a sitting President."
Zoom Out:
- Meta's decision to suspend Trump's account fuelled debates about whether social media firms had gained too much power over public discourse.
