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Trump will be suspended from Facebook for at least two years

The social network says after that period it "will look to experts to assess whether the risk to public safety has receded."

Queenie Wong Former Senior Writer
Queenie Wong was a senior writer for CNET News, focusing on social media companies including Facebook's parent company Meta, Twitter and TikTok. Before joining CNET, she worked for The Mercury News in San Jose and the Statesman Journal in Salem, Oregon. A native of Southern California, she took her first journalism class in middle school.
Expertise I've been writing about social media since 2015 but have previously covered politics, crime and education. I also have a degree in studio art. Credentials
  • 2022 Eddie award for consumer analysis
Queenie Wong
3 min read
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Former US President Donald Trump was suspended from multiple social networks in January.  

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Facebook said Friday that former US president Donald Trump will remain suspended from its platform until at least 2023 and after that period the company will "will look to experts to assess whether the risk to public safety has receded."

The social media giant's highly anticipated decision comes after an oversight board, tasked with reviewing Facebook's toughest content moderation decisions, upheld the suspension but asked the company to take a closer look at its rules and determine how long Trump's suspension would last. The move will likely prompt criticism from both political parties, which Facebook is anticipating.

Facebook, like other social networks, suspended Trump from the platform after the deadly US Capitol Hill riots on Jan. 6 over concerns his remarks would incite violence. Facebook said at the time that Trump's suspension was "indefinite," but the oversight board pointed out that the social network's rules don't include that penalty. The social network said that the suspension period would last until January 2023, which is two years from when he was first booted from Facebook and Instagram.

"We know that any penalty we apply — or choose not to apply — will be controversial. There are many people who believe it was not appropriate for a private company like Facebook to suspend an outgoing President from its platform, and many others who believe Mr. Trump should have immediately been banned for life," Facebook's vice president of global affairs Nick Clegg said in a blog post.

Facebook has typically had a mostly hands-off approach to political speech but tries to balance whether newsworthiness outweighs the risk of harm. After two years, Clegg said, Facebook will examine different factors such as "violence, restrictions on peaceful assembly and other markers of civil unrest" to determine whether Trump will be able to post again on Facebook and Instagram. 

"When the suspension is eventually lifted, there will be a strict set of rapidly escalating sanctions that will be triggered if Mr. Trump commits further violations in future, up to and including permanent removal of his pages and accounts," Clegg said. 

Trump said in a statement that Facebook's decision was an "insult" to the people who voted for him in the 2020 presidential election. "They shouldn't be allowed to get away with this censoring and silencing, and ultimately, we will win. Our Country can't take this abuse anymore!" 

After his suspensions from various social networks, Trump launched a blog but eventually shut it down because he was displeased by the low readership, The Washington Post reported, citing an anonymous adviser. 

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters on Friday that every tech platform has a responsibility to combat disinformation and misinformation. "We learned a lot from...the former president over the last couple years about his behavior and how he uses these platforms. Feels pretty unlikely that the zebra's going to change his stripes over the next two years," she said.

Facebook also said it's making other changes to how it handles political speech, including providing more public information about how it weighs whether a piece of content is newsworthy enough to stay up despite violating its rules. When Facebook assesses whether content is newsworthy it "will not treat content posted by politicians any differently from content posted by anyone else." Instead, Facebook will apply this newsworthy test in the same way to all content and not presume that any speech is inherently newsworthy.

The social network said it rarely leaves up a post that violates its rules because of newsworthiness. Facebook said it incorrectly told the board that it never applied the newsworthiness exception to content posted by Trump. The social network did apply this exception in 2019 when Trump posted a New Hampshire rally video in which he said: "That guy's got a serious weight problem. Go home. Start exercising." Facebook said those remarks violated its rules against bullying and harassment but the company left up the video because it determined that the harm was low risk and that there was a high public interest because Trump was running for reelection.