Former US President Donald Trump said on Friday his two-year ban by Facebook was an “insult” to voters, renewing his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.
“Facebook’s ruling is an insult to the record-setting 75M people, plus many others, who voted for us in the 2020 Rigged Presidential Election,” Trump said in a statement.
“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!”
But Angelo Carusone of the left-leaning watchdog group Media Matters for America, called Facebook’s move dangerous, saying that if Trump is reinstated, “the platform will remain a simmering cauldron of extremism, disinformation, and violence.”
Activists joined together in a group that facetiously calls itself The Real Facebook Oversight Board decried the social network’s latest steps as belated and insufficient.
“Facebook shouldn’t have needed a $130 million Oversight Board and a team of law professors to tell them dictators and authoritarians were running wild on their platforms,” the group said in a release.
Trump was suspended from Facebook and Instagram after posting a video during the attack by his fired-up supporters challenging his election loss, in which he told them: “We love you, you’re very special.”
The panel gave Facebook six months to justify why his ban should be permanent — putting the ball in company chief Mark Zuckerberg’s court and spotlighting weaknesses in the platform’s plan for self-regulation.
Zuckerberg has stressed his belief that private companies should not be the arbiters of truth when it comes to what people say.
The oversight board, which was created as part of Zuckerberg’s vision for a “supreme court” for difficult content decisions, said it has begun a review of the latest decision on Trump “and will offer further comment once this review is complete.”
(AFP)
