On Thursday, former President Donald Trump's Facebook and Instagram accounts were reactivated.
Meta, the owner and operator of Facebook and Instagram, stated in a blog post last month that Trump's suspension on both social media networks will come to an end "in the coming weeks."
Nick Clegg, the President of global affairs at Meta, declared that the organization had decided Trump was no longer a "serious risk to public safety" and had put "guardrails" in place for his comeback.
"To assess whether the serious risk to public safety that existed in January 2021 has sufficiently receded, we have evaluated the current environment according to our Crisis Policy Protocol, which included looking at the conduct of the US 2022 midterm elections, and expert assessments on the current security environment," Clegg wrote. "Our determination is that the risk has sufficiently receded, and that we should therefore adhere to the two-year timeline we set out. As such, we will be reinstating Mr. Trumps Facebook and Instagram accounts in the coming weeks. However, we are doing so with new guardrails in place to deter repeat offenses."
Meta announced that Trump is indefinitely for his alleged involvement with the Capitol protest on Jan. 6, 2021.
The move to take President Trump off the various social media platforms was heavily contested on both sides of the political aisle and marked the first time a sitting Commander-In-Chief had been excluded from Facebook. In addition, Trump was also blocked from Twitter, YouTube, and Snapchat.
Twitter has reactivated the account of the former President, yet he has not generated any content on the platform since being reinstated.
In response to the change issued by Meta last month, Trump used his TruthSocial platform to criticize the initial decision by Facebook and parent company Meta to prohibit him from using their platforms.
"FACEBOOK, which has lost Billions of Dollars in value since de-platforming your favorite President, me, has just announced that they are reinstating my account," he wrote shortly after 4 p.m. "Such a thing should never again happen to a sitting President or anybody else who is not deserving of retribution!"
Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for the Trump campaign, spoke to Fox News Digital and mentioned how instrumental Facebook was in the former president's victory in 2016, noting that Trump had leaned heavily on Facebook ads to defeat Hillary Clinton.
According to Cheung, Trump spent a total of $44 million on advertisement campaigns between June and November of that year, producing almost 6 million unique ads.
At the beginning of this year, the legal team of the Trump campaign requested an appointment with the higher-ups of Meta in hopes of seeing a "prompt reinstatement to the platform." According to a Fox News report based on NBC's coverage, Scott Gast, the Trump campaign's general counsel, sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, Nick Clegg, and Joel Kaplan (Meta's Vice President of Global Public Policy).
Gast said that the decision "immediately drew widespread criticism from across the political spectrum at home and abroad." "Facebooks own Oversight Board raised concern about how the ban was implemented, advising the company to develop 'clear, necessary, and proportionate policies that promote public safety and respect freedom of expression,'" he added.
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