Facebook Says Trump Now Suspended Until At Least January 2023
PALO ALTO (CNN Business) -- Facebook announced Friday that former President Donald Trump would be suspended from its platform until at least Jan. 7, 2023 -- two years from when he was initially suspended.
Facebook said it will then assess the circumstances to see if he should be allowed back on.
The company said in a post Friday that once the two years is up, it "will look to experts to assess whether the risk to public safety has receded. We will evaluate external factors, including instances of violence, restrictions on peaceful assembly and other markers of civil unrest. If we determine that there is still a serious risk to public safety, we will extend the restriction for a set period of time and continue to re-evaluate until that risk has receded."
In the post, written by Nick Clegg, the company's vice president for global affairs, also announced new rules for "enforcement protocols to be applied in exceptional cases such as this." The change comes in the wake of the unprecedented step the company took of indefinitely suspending Trump in January -- and the way its independent oversight board rebuked it for the arbitrary nature of that suspension.
Politicians have typically been given leeway on Facebook because the company operated on the assumption that their posts were newsworthy and part of the public debate. As a result, the company did not apply its regular rules to their posts. But now Facebook will no longer assume newsworthiness for the posts of world leaders, a Facebook source told CNN Business.
However, the company will not be ending its newsworthiness exception entirely. The company will continue to use the exception, according to the source, but, in another significant change, will begin explicitly disclosing when the exception has been applied.
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