Meta is preparing to announce whether it will reinstate Donald Trump on Facebook and Instagram, in what will be the most divisive moderation decision made by the US tech giant to date.
Trump, whose use of social media aided his election in 2016, was barred from Meta’s platforms for inciting violence shortly after a group of his supporters stormed the US Capitol in January 2021.
The $300 billion corporation has previously stated that it will make a decision on whether to allow the former president to return by January 7, 2023. According to a person familiar with the discussions, that decision is now expected to be announced later this month.
According to insiders, Trump’s fate, as he ramps up his bid for the presidency in 2024, will be the biggest test of authority yet faced by Meta’s president of global affairs Nick Clegg. After taking on an expanded role as the company’s policy leader in February, the former UK deputy prime minister will oversee the decision.
Mark Zuckerberg, who previously made the final decision on moderation issues, is now focused on product and his emerging metaverse vision — but he could still step in as CEO, chair, and controlling shareholder.
According to people familiar with the company’s operations, the company has formed a working group to address the issue. Staff from the public policy and communications teams, as well as the content policy team led by Monika Bickert and the safety and integrity teams led by Guy Rosen, are part of the group.
Clegg did not respond. “We believe that any private company — and this is really regardless of one’s personal views on Donald Trump — should tread with great thoughtfulness when seeking to, basically, silence political voices,” he said at a Council on Foreign Relations conference in October.
The result will be divisive. Experts say that allowing Trump to return to the platform will inflame tensions with Republican allies of the former US president, who accuse the company of censoring conservative views; other left-leaning groups argue that allowing him to return is irresponsible and harmful to democracy.
“It’s still a judgment call,” said Katie Harbath, a Bipartisan Policy Center fellow and former Facebook public policy director in charge of elections. “It’s an impossible trade-off, and both decisions have unintended consequences.”
It comes after Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, recently reversed a permanent ban on Trump after polling users, though the former president has yet to post anything on the platform since the reversal. Trump has mostly posted messages on Truth Social, a competing social media site that he founded and runs.
The decision will also have an impact on Meta’s $118 billion-a-year business, potentially driving away advertisers if Trump’s content is deemed dangerous, while also bringing in more if his campaign chooses to advertise on the platform ahead of the 2024 election.
The former US president was suspended “indefinitely” the day after the attack on the US Capitol building in Washington, for what Zuckerberg described as his decision “to incite violent insurrection against a democratically elected government” and “condone not condemn”.
That decision was upheld by Meta’s oversight board, a Supreme Court-style body comprised of academics and experts that evaluates moderation decisions and which Clegg helped to establish. The board, however, objected to the lifetime ban and ordered Meta to reconsider its decision within two years.
Meta has stated that it will consult experts and reverse its harshest rebuke of a global leader. If the ban is lifted, the company said in June that there will be a “strict set of rapidly escalating sanctions that will be triggered if Mr. Trump commits further violations in the future,” with the permanent removal of his pages and accounts being the harshest potential punishment.
Meta declined to comment further on its process for determining whether Trump should be barred, as well as the experts it has consulted.
Some academics argue that Trump’s rhetoric continues to endanger public safety. According to a study conducted last month by the left-wing advocacy group Accountable Tech, 350 posts from Trump’s account on Truth Social would violate Facebook’s policy rules.
There were over 100 posts amplifying the followers and sympathizers of QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy group that Meta banned from its platforms after the FBI designated it a domestic terror threat. Around 240 posts were peddling “harmful election-related disinformation”, according to the report.
“If Facebook looks at what Trump has been publicly putting out in the last few years, it is clear he is not a diminished threat to safety; if anything, he has become more emboldened,” said Nicole Gill, co-founder and executive director of Accountable Tech. “Facebook bears a significant amount of responsibility here.”
Anupam Chander, a professor in global internet regulation at Georgetown University, agreed but noted one difficulty for Meta is that Trump’s speech is often vague enough that it can be “read in more ways than one”.
“It depends on how you read the statement,” he explained. “Internet platforms are in an impossible situation.”
Some Trump supporters argue that there is no clear imminent threat to public safety associated with the former president.
Other experts express reservations about the implications of free speech.
“If they do keep him off… political speech is among the most protected, and I’m really concerned about the direction this is going to send us in,” said Harbath, who is also the International Republican Institute’s director of technology and democracy.
She and others warn that excluding a presidential candidate from a platform sets a dangerous precedent that could embolden leaders in other countries to try to silence rival politicians’ speech.
“These decisions are being made within the context of US politics,” said Casey Mattox, senior fellow for free speech at the right-wing Charles Koch Institute.
“However, the reality is that the decision it makes in US circumstances has consequences outside of the US context.”
“Authoritarian governments, no doubt, are looking at arguments made by democracies that are meant to protect democracy but also provide tools for authoritarian governments to… protect their own,” Mattox added.
