Facebook announced on Friday that it would ban former U.S. President Donald Trump from its platform for a period of two years.
The move comes in response to recommendations from Facebook’s Independent Oversight Board, which criticized the tech giant last month for using arbitrary punishment to penalize the former president.
The move will prevent Trump from using the platform for the next two years as he prepares to launch a possible presidential campaign for 2024.
The social network also unveiled new policies on how it will handle the speech of prominent politicians in the future.
Facebook’s new policies call for either time-limited suspensions or permanent account deletions, not indefinite suspensions.
Facebook asked the Supervisory Board to assess its decision to ban Donald Trump indefinitely following the riots on Capitol Hill on January 6, attributed to supporters of the former president.
The said council said last month that Facebook must either permanently ban Trump’s accounts on Facebook and Instagram or set a time limit for which they would be suspended.
Facebook, like Twitter, had excluded Mr. Trump for breaking his rules following the Jan.6 riot on Capitol Hill, then referred the case to the supervisory board.
While Twitter was President Trump’s medium of choice, Facebook was his most effective fundraising tool. The 45th President of the United States had more than 60 million followers on Facebook and Instagram, the other social network owned by the Menlo Park firm. The move will leave the former president with limited means to reach the general public in the same way he did when he was president.
Mr. Trump regularly issues statements to the press via email, and while many of them are widely reported on social media, his reach and dominance over news cycles has clearly diminished.
Mr. Trump and his conservative allies have lambasted social media bans as censorship and called for new laws to punish affected companies and limit their power to set rules of speech on their platforms.
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