Donald Trump has been deemed responsible enough to have social media again.
A little more than two years after the Donald found himself banned from Facebook and Instagram thanks to comments he made in connection to the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, the social media platforms’ parent company, Meta, has announced that it’s letting the onetime Chief Executive of the United States back onto its platforms.
In a blog post on Wednesday, Nick Clegg, president of global affairs at Meta, wrote:
“The suspension was an extraordinary decision taken in extraordinary circumstances. The normal state of affairs is that the public should be able to hear from a former President of the United States, and a declared candidate for that office again, on our platforms. Now that the time period of the suspension has elapsed, the question is not whether we choose to reinstate Mr. Trump’s accounts, but whether there remain such extraordinary circumstances that extending the suspension beyond the original two-year period is justified.”
Clegg goes on to say that Trump will face “heightened penalties for repeat offenses,” which will be applied to other public figures whose accounts have been reinstated. Meta claimed to have designed protocols for content that may not violate their community guidelines but could delegitimize future elections or be related to QAnon. Among these new protocols, Clegg states, Trump’s content would remain visible on Trump’s account but would not be distributed to his to the public, and they may go so far as to remove the share button on these posts.
Twitter permanently exiled Trump at the same time as the other two platforms, but Elon Musk reactivated Ol’ 45’s account in November as part of his free speech campaign after taking over the company—and shortly before Musk suspended the accounts of several journalists who were critical of him. It’s possible that even Trump sees the rapidly spiraling usefulness of Twitter, as has still not used it since his account was reinstated.
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