Facebook Decides to Block U.S. President Donald Trump Indefinitely
- Social media platforms are banning the accounts of Donald Trump after he failed to condemn the Capitol attacks.
- Facebook has blocked the account until at least the change of power to Joe Biden is completed.
- Twitter allowed Trump back, where he returned with a message of concession.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the board’s decision to block Donald Trump’s account, the U.S. President, on grounds of abuse. As he explains, D. Trump’s intentions are in line with a peaceful and lawful transition of power to his elected successor, Joe Biden, and the outgoing President is using social media to promote ambiguous and unsubstantiated claims that incite violent and anti-democratic acts like the shocking events that took place in the United States Capitol yesterday.
Furthermore, Zuckerberg worries about the role that Facebook could play if these actions see follow-ups, as neo-nazi accelerationists are already calling for the start of a civil war, seeing this as the ideal moment in time. Donald Trump has 13 days left for his term in office, and Facebook would prefer to make sure that nothing crazy happens until Joe Biden takes the helm.
In Zuckerberg’s own words:
Of course, the social media giant has always been the foster of right-wing hate speech and the dissemination of baseless conspiracy theories that have poisoned people’s minds and led to the recent events, but this part was conveniently left aside. This has been repeatedly documented in the American press and underlined with the boldest of titles, but Facebook decided not to actually do anything about it all this time.
The move to ban Trump comes only after the situation escalated to the ultimate level, exposing the platform’s role and the real impact it can have on people and society in general.
President Trump was banned from Twitter too when he decided to repeat the same false claims of voter fraud in the aftermath of the Capitol attacks, failing to condemn them as he should. The social media platform allowed him back after certain tweets that violated Twitter’s rules were deleted. The U.S. President returned with the following message.
Other social media platforms that are keeping the official account of D. Trump is banned, blocked, or restricted state at the moment are Instagram, Twitch, and even Shopify.