One of the biggest media platforms announced on Wednesday that it would continue to censor messages from former President Donald Trump.
And the 45th president had something to say about their ruling.
Trump won’t return to Facebook — at least not yet.
Four months after Facebook suspended Trump’s accounts following the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, the company’s quasi-independent oversight board upheld the bans. But it told Facebook to specify how long they would last, saying that its “indefinite” ban on the former president was unreasonable.
The ruling, which gives Facebook six months to comply, effectively postpones any possible Trump reinstatement and puts the onus for that decision squarely back on the company.
Trump responded from his blog, which he designed to help push back on social media censorship.
“What Facebook, Twitter, and Google have done is a total disgrace and an embarrassment to our Country. Free Speech has been taken away from the President of the United States because the Radical Left Lunatics are afraid of the truth, but the truth will come out anyway, bigger and stronger than ever before,” he wrote.
“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.”
BREAKING: President Trump releases a statement on Big Tech companies: pic.twitter.com/9py1CKjFGz
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) May 5, 2021
Trump’s supporters remain enraged over the bans, while his critics push for broader social-media regulation of speech that isn’t politically correct.
“It is a sad day for America. It’s a sad day for Facebook because I can tell you, a number of members of Congress are now looking at: Do they break up Facebook, do they make sure that they don’t have a monopoly? And I can tell you that it is two different standards, one for Donald Trump and one for a number of other people that are on their sites,” Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, told Fox News.
“Facebook and Twitter and others have clearly established two different sets of rules. One if you’re a conservative or a Republican or have a different ideology than them and one if you’re a liberal,” a longtime Trump political adviser, Corey Lewandowski, said in an interview.
The oversight board insisted that Facebook ultimately needed to take responsibility for its decision.
“Facebook should either permanently disable Trump’s account or impose a suspension for a specific period of time,” said board co-chair Helle Thorning-Schmidt, a former Danish prime minister.
The decision has implications not only for Trump but for tech companies, world leaders, and people across the political spectrum — many of whom have wildly conflicting views of the proper role for technology companies when it comes to regulating online speech and protecting people from abuse and misinformation.
After years of handling Trump’s unorthodox rhetoric with a light touch, Facebook and Instagram took the drastic step of silencing his accounts in January. In announcing the unprecedented move, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the risk of allowing Trump to continue using the platform was too great.
“The shocking events of the last 24 hours clearly demonstrate that President Donald Trump intends to use his remaining time in office to undermine the peaceful and lawful transition of power to his elected successor, Joe Biden,” Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page on Jan. 7.
A day before the oversight board’s decision was announced, Trump unveiled a new blog on his personal website, “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump.” The page includes a dramatic video claiming, “A BEACON OF FREEDOM ARISES” and hailing “A PLACE TO SPEAK FREELY AND SAFELY.”
The page is a display of Trump’s recent statements that can be easily shared on Facebook and Twitter, the platforms that banished him after the riot.
Barred from social media, Trump has embraced other platforms for getting his message out. He does frequent interviews with friendly news outlets and has emailed a flurry of statements to reporters through his official office and political group.
Trump has even said he prefers the statements to his old tweets, often describing them as more “elegant.”
The Associated Press contributed to this article