In a press release today, Facebook said it will suspend former President Donald Trump’s accounts for two years following its finding that "he stoked violence ahead of the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection".
So Facebook "found" Trump guilty as if they were a court of law?
“At the end of this period, we 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,” Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, wrote in a blog post Friday.
Who are these "experts" they will look into? It is obvious that Facebook is attempting to control what we think. For all we know, these experts could be Democrats that are trying to discredit a Repulican president in order to win the next election. I'm not saying Trump is totally clean in this. His words on January 6 did fuel hatred towards congress. Whether he intended for this to happen is up to debate as we can't read his mind, but he did contribute to it. That being said, we don't need Facebook to control the flow of information. We should have the right to see or read Trump's thoughts as this a basic right that we have as Americans.
This is setting a troubling precent for social media platforms as they can ban anyone whom they don't agree with.
Just to be fair and allow the reader to come to his/her own conclusions, here is the rest of the press release:
"Facebook also plans to end a contentious policy championed by CEO Mark Zuckerberg that automatically exempted politicians from rules that banned hate speech and abuse. The company has said it has never applied this policy to Trump.
"The social media giant said on Friday that while it will still apply this “newsworthiness” exemption to certain posts it deems to be in the public interest even if they violate Facebook rules, it will no longer treat material posted by politicians any differently from that posted by anyone else. In addition, Facebook said it will make public whenever it does apply the exemption to a post.
"The announcements are in response to recommendations from the company’s quasi-independent oversight board. Last month that panel upheld a decision by Facebook to keep former Trump indefinitely suspended but said the company could not merely suspend him “indefinitely” and gave it six months to decide what to do with his accounts."
It turns out that the statement, "the company has said it has never applied this policy to Trump", is false. Facing criticism, Facebook did admit today that they did use policy once against Trump, in 2019 for a video of a rally on his Facebook page.
The former president called Facebook’s decision on the suspension "an insult."
"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!" Trump said in a news release.
