Mark Zuckerberg announced on Thursday that Facebook has blocked President Donald Trump from accessing his accounts indefinitely.
The Facebook cofounder and CEO said Trump wouldn’t be able to access his Facebook and Instagram at least until there is a peaceful transition of power in the next two weeks.
“We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great,” he wrote in a statement posted to his Facebook page.
After years of Facebook serving as a hub of pro-Trump disinformation, Zuckerberg seemingly decided to rapidly reverse course. This, of course, comes after a pro-Trump mob raided the Capitol on Wednesday in an attempted coup to overturn the results of the election in which president-elect Joe Biden won.
Facebook removed statements from Trump Wednesday night after the storming and temporarily restricted access to his account. Thursday, the company went further.
“Over the last several years, we have allowed President Trump to use our platform consistent with our own rules, at times removing content or labeling his posts when they violate our policies,” the statement from Zuckerberg reads, in part. “We did this because we believe that the public has a right to the broadest possible access to political speech, even controversial speech. But the current context is now fundamentally different, involving use of our platform to incite violent insurrection against a democratically elected government.”
Zuckerberg then concluded his statement: “We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great. Therefore, we are extending the block we have placed on his Facebook and Instagram accounts indefinitely and for at least the next two weeks until the peaceful transition of power is complete.”
One Facebook worker to me on Trump’s indefinite suspension from the platform: “All it took was an armed insurrection of the cap building and two weeks left of his presidency.”
— Ryan Mac 🙃 (@RMac18) January 7, 2021
As violent pro-Trump rioters broke into the Capitol on Wednesday, social platforms locked Trump’s accounts because the president continued to spread falsehoods about the election being stolen. Soon enough, Trump couldn’t access his Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Snapchat accounts. Twitter, the president’s favorite platform, threatened to keep his account lock until he deleted three tweets it deemed “severe violations of our Civic Integrity policy.”
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