Donald Trump’s ban from Facebook and Instagram has been upheld by Facebook’s Oversight Board. The former president was banned from both sites in January following the Capitol Hill riots.
The board said it concluded that Trump’s posts on January 6, which praised the rioters, “severely violated” Facebook’s policies and “created an environment where a serious risk of violence was possible.”
However, it criticised the permanent nature of the ban as beyond the scope of Facebook’s normal penalties requesting for a review of the decision and imposing disciplinary actions such as a “time-bound period of suspension” or permanently disabling the account.
The Oversight Board decided that Mr Trump had broken Facebook’s community standards, and upheld the ban.
“It is not permissible for Facebook to keep a user off the platform for an undefined period, with no criteria for when or whether the account will be restored,” it said in a statement.
Applying that type of ban to Mr Trump was not following any clear procedure, it said.
In the meantime, Donald Trump who is also banned from Twitter, launched a new website on Tuesday to update supporters with his thoughts.
Following the ruling, Mr Trump wrote that “what Facebook, Twitter, and Google have done is a total disgrace”.
“Free speech has been taken away from the President of the United States because the radical left lunatics are afraid of the truth,” he said, referring to himself as president.
“The people of our country will not stand for it! These corrupt social media companies must pay a political price, and must never again be allowed to destroy and decimate our electoral process,” he said.
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