Executives at Facebook say that they are “allowing” the Facebook user with the most followers ever to come back online. They say this is a brave and kind thing to do.
The Daily Mail reported on Wednesday that Facebook parent company Meta will let former President Donald Trump back on the platform after keeping him off for two years.
“As a general rule, we don’t want to get in the way of open, public, and democratic debate on Meta’s platforms,” wrote Nick Clegg, the company’s president of global affairs, in a blog post about the change. “This is especially true during elections in democratic countries like the U.S.”
He wrote, “The public should be able to hear what their politicians are saying, the good, the bad, and the ugly, so they can make well-informed decisions at the polls.”
It’s not clear what changed between now and when Facebook censored a President who had already been elected and was in office, but something has. It could be because Tech is letting go of a lot of people.
The change comes after Twitter CEO Elon Musk lifted the site’s ban on President Trump, which had been put in place while he was still in office after the events at the US Capitol on January 6.
Trump hasn’t tweeted anything yet.
DM said that giving Trump access to his accounts could affect the 2024 presidential campaign. Trump has a lot of fans on social media, but he has been posting on his own Truth Social site, and he hasn’t stopped saying that the election was “stolen,” even though many of his supporters’ lawsuits have been thrown out and Congress has met to count the votes certified by states before and after the Capitol riot.
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google all blocked Trump so he could not report any details about what was happening with the disastrous 2020 election, which convinced a majority of Americans that something is terribly wrong with American elections.
“Facebook doesn’t fact check the claims by political candidates, and competitor Twitter has been slashing moderation staff amid firings and purges instituted by Musk,” DM reported, hinting again at the competition between the two platforms to retain customers.
‘In the event that Mr. Trump posts further violating content, the content will be removed and he will be suspended for between one month and two years, depending on the severity of the violation,’ according to the company.
The threat of big tech censorship is something the Tech ‘oligarchs continue to wield, however:
Clegg, the former deputy prime minister of the U.K., said the move ‘does not mean there are no limits to what people can say on our platform.’
‘When there is a clear risk of real world harm — a deliberately high bar for Meta to intervene in public discourse — we act,’ he wrote.
The Daily Mail continued:
“News of the change comes as Trump is seeking new ways to engage the public. A report Wednesday has revealed that he has begun reaching out to people he knows via text.
In recent days he used online platforms to blast congressional Democrats and even send around a link to a DailyMail.com story about the Joe Biden document saga.
The ban came amid a flurry of election misinformation, in both the 2016 and the 2020 presidential elections
The House January 6 committee explored the issue at length, though it left pages of material out of its final report.”
Coincidentally, after the GOP, they vowed to crack down on ‘Big tech,’ which many Republicans have long argued has a bias against conservatives.
“The suspensions, although deemed allowable by private companies who control their own platforms, helped prompt a backlash against restrictions on speech. House Republicans are already preparing to probe efforts to suppress information about a report about Hunter Biden’s laptop online,” Daily Mail reported, covering for Big Tech’s power grabs.
Meta and other platforms are facing a tough regulatory environment. On Tuesday, the Justice Department announced it was suing Google over its dominance in online ads.
Trump issued a statement attacking Facebook and praising his own platform:
‘FACEBOOK, which has lost Billions of Dollars in value since ‘deplatforming’ your favorite President, me, has just announced that they are reinstating my account. Such a thing should never again happen to a sitting President, or anybody else who is not deserving of retribution! THANK YOU TO TRUTH SOCIAL FOR DOING SUCH AN INCREDIBLE JOB. YOUR GROWTH IS OUTSTANDING, AND FUTURE UNLIMITED!!!’ Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Meta said the public risk had ‘sufficiently receded,’ which sounds sort of funny- to be honest.
Should he choose to, the new policy gives Trump a chance to try to run many of the same plays he did in his previous campaigns.
He plans to hold his first campaign rally in South Carolina in days. The platform allowed Trump to mercilessly attack his opponents, with his events carried online and sometimes on cable networks.
Tweets and other posts will allow him to both attack Biden and Democrats as well as pressure Republicans amid internecine battles over power and spending, and the left is freaking out about the power he has to reach a massive movement of American voters- who are furious.
Rephrased from: The Republic Brief By: Trump Knows
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