As the country is still reeling from the storming of the U.S. Capitol Building on Wednesday, social media companies are coming to terms with the platform they’ve given to President Donald Trump and his most violent supporters.
Facebook, one of the president’s favorite places to post, has decided that enough is enough. On Thursday morning, Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote that Trump would be blocked from his Facebook and Instagram accounts indefinitely.
Facebook and other social media platforms have largely taken a hands-off approach to monitoring Trump’s social media content. They have argued that his posts are inherently important to the public because he is a world leader, and therefore they should be kept up.
But recently, Trump has used his accounts to spread troves of election disinformation, which goes against Facebook rules. As a result, many of his posts have been flagged or removed. But this hasn’t stopped him from continuing to post disinformation.
The final straw was when Trump used his social media platforms to amplify a protest in Washington, D.C., to contest the results of the 2020 presidential election. After Trump spoke to a crowd of demonstrators on Wednesday, a large number of them broke into the grounds of the U.S. Capitol in order to disrupt the election certification that was currently happening there. As a result, the certification process had to be put on hold and dozens of government officials had to go into hiding, fearing for their safety.
On January 6, Facebook removed several of Trump’s posts relating to these events and placed a temporary ban on his Facebook and Instagram accounts. In Zuckerberg’s note, he announced that the company decided to indefinitely extend this ban for at least two weeks. This two-week period represents the time until Inauguration Day, when the presidency will be handed to Joe Biden.
By blocking Trump from his accounts, Facebook hopes that it can quell the potential for another violent insurrection.
“We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great,” Zuckerberg wrote in his Facebook post. “Therefore, we are extending the block we have placed on his Facebook and Instagram accounts indefinitely and for at least the next two weeks until the peaceful transition of power is complete.”
