During that time, Zuckerberg repeatedly defended his company’s responsibility to protect freedom of speech and his desire to keep Facebook from becoming an arbiter of truth. He first announced plans for an “independent body” to review content decisions in late 2018, but the board didn’t start operating for almost two years. The ruling will increase scrutiny of both the company and the Oversight Board, which was born out of a longstanding argument by Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg that Facebook shouldn’t be making so many decisions about what speech is acceptable on its service. Twitter Inc., Trump’s favorite social network, banned him permanently, and executives say it has no plans to reverse that decision.īut Facebook is alone in its plan to outsource the decision about Trump’s future on the platform. and Alphabet Inc.’s YouTube were among companies that also blocked Trump’s accounts.

House from certifying the election for President Joe Biden. Capitol in a riot that left five dead and delayed the U.S. 6, in which he roiled a crowd of supporters to storm the U.S. “There is both what’s at stake for Facebook, but then also what’s at stake I think more broadly in terms of the debate and the questions around how world leaders should be held accountable for the things that they say and push on the internet.”įacebook wasn’t the only company to take the extraordinary step of suspending Trump’s accounts after the president posted videos of a Washington rally on Jan. “For a company like Facebook it is putting them back at the center, the epicenter of a lot of these debates around where the line is around legal but harmful content,” said Katie Harbath, a former public policy director at Facebook who left the company in March. Whatever the board concludes, its ruling will set a precedent for how Facebook handles future posts from other political leaders around the world who rely on the platform to make or break public policy, win elections, and influence social movements. Banning Trump permanently is apt to spark even more backlash from conservatives who favor a more hands-off approach to content moderation. If the board restores Trump’s account, Facebook will contend with fresh criticism that it doesn’t do enough to stop dangerous and false information from spreading on its platform. The decision in the coming days by the Oversight Board, an independent group of lawyers, academics and journalists, will be binding, and marks the most significant test since the panel’s formation last year.

The ban was extended indefinitely, meaning Trump’s Facebook page - where he often posted more than a dozen times a day - has been frozen for more than three months, intensifying long-running accusations of political bias against conservatives and adding fire to the debate about social media companies’ refereeing of speech.

6, forbidding him from sharing content with his 35 million followers after his posts encouraged a violent mob that stormed the U.S. Facebook Inc.’s de facto Supreme Court of content is on the verge of ruling on Donald Trump’s return to the world’s largest social network, a closely watched decision that’s likely to be just as consequential for the social media giant as it is for the former U.S.

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