Vice President for Public Affairs said, global Facebook member Nick CleggFacebook has extended the ban of former US President Donald Trump indefinitely to a two-year suspension that will expire on January 7, 2023. It will then re-evaluate Trump's ban "to assess whether the risk to public safety has receded. If Trump is reinstated and he violates Facebook's rules again, the company will apply a strict, rapidly escalating set of sanctions that could lead to a permanent ban.
The suspension accompanies a broader change in how Facebook treats newsworthy posts that violate its rules and the rhetoric of politicians. The social network will still allow some offending content of news interest or important to the public interest to remain online. But it will start publishing rare cases when the publication-worthy exemption applies. From now on, politicians will be subject to the same content rules as other users, a sharp reversal from Facebook's previous policy that mostly protected elected officials from such enforcement.
Facebook's Clegg wrote in a blog post, when we rate content for news importance, we will not treat content posted by politicians any differently from content posted by anyone else. Instead, we will simply apply the newsletter balancing test in the same way to all content, measuring whether the content's public interest value outweighs the potential risk of harm by letting it go.
Facebook executives previously emphasized that politicians' rhetoric was inherently in the public interest and that private companies should only intervene in the most exceptional circumstances. This situation has allowed Trump and other elected leaders to use the platform in ways that are punishable by ordinary users under Facebook's content rules.
And by opening politicians to more ruthless moderation in the future, the company could further anger governments that have already begun threatening tech companies to censor political speech.
In which Trump called Facebook's ruling an insult to his supporters who voted in the rigged presidential election, adding that the company should not be allowed to escape this censorship and silencing. Facebook made the changes in response to a request from the Oversight Board, a group of human rights experts funded to pass judgments on controversial content decisions. The board of directors asked Facebook to review its recommendations on clarifying the status of Trump's account, along with changing the way it treats politicians differently from other users.