The Washington Post wrote a rather definitive account of the social network’s yearslong Trump-appeasement campaign earlier this year. The only thing that has been consistent, until now, is Facebook?s determination to contort, hair-split, and reimagine its rules to make sure nothing Trump posted would fall too far outside them. Zuckerberg’s claim that Facebook has allowed Trump to use its platform in a manner “consistent with our own rules” is laughable. As I wrote in 2019, there’s just one golden rule of content moderation that every platform follows: If a policy becomes too controversial, change it. The unprecedented move, which lacks a clear basis in any of Facebook’s previously stated policies, highlights for the millionth time that the dominant platforms are quite literally making up the rules of online speech as they go along.
Yet Facebook’s “indefinite” ban on Trump marks an overnight reversal of the policy on Trump and other political leaders that the social network has spent the past four years honing, justifying, and defending. Will Oremus has a long (and very interesting!) look over on OneZero about how Facebook supposedly chucked out its own rulebook to come up with an excuse to suspend Trump’s account: Then you have Trump haters who are screaming about how this is all way too late and is trying to close the barn door after the horses have long since bolted. You have Trump supporters who are furious and (falsely) claiming that this is “censorship” or unprecedented and heavy handed (it is none of those things).
This is a bigger deal, not just because it’s permanent, rather than indefinite, but because so much of Trump’s identity over the last four years (and before that) is tied up in his Twitter account and followers.Ĭertainly, all of this has kicked off a whole new storm from across the political spectrum. I had lots to say on that… and then Friday afternoon, Twitter decided to ban Trump’s Twitter account permanently. When I started writing this post, it was about Facebook’s decision to suspend Trump’s account indefinitely, and at least until Joe Biden is inaugurated in a couple weeks.
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