Facebook’s oversight board has decided to keep former President Donald Trump permanently banned from the platform.
From the Post Millennial:Â
They said that “Trump’s posts during the Capitol riot severely violated Facebook’s rules and encouraged and legitimized violence.”
The Board has upheld Facebook’s decision on January 7 to suspend then-President Trump from Facebook and Instagram. Trump’s posts during the Capitol riot severely violated Facebook’s rules and encouraged and legitimized violence. https://t.co/veRvWpeyCi
— Oversight Board (@OversightBoard) May 5, 2021
But the Oversight Board also found that Facebook violated its own rules by making the suspension of Trump indefinite, something that was not outlined in its rules:
That penalty, they wrote, “is not described in Facebook’s content policies. It has no clear criteria and gives Facebook total discretion on when to impose or lift it.”
As a result, the Board found that Facebook should “review this matter and decide a new penalty that reflects its rules, the severity of the violation, and prospect of future harm. Facebook can either impose a time-limited suspension or account deletion.”
Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts have been suspended since the day after the Jan. 6 Capitol Riot.
Facebook referred the ban in late January to its oversight board, an independent entity created in 2018 to help Facebook decide controversial content moderation policies. The board’s decisions are binding on the company, and not even CEO Mark Zuckerberg can overrule a Oversight Board decision.
The board consists of 20 members from backgrounds such as academics, politics, law, and human rights. It first overturned a Facebook decision in January of this year, reversing four of the five content moderation decisions the company had made.
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