Facebook Oversight Board upholds Trump suspension but orders company to review

The Facebook Oversight Board on Wednesday upheld the suspension of former President Donald Trump’s account, four months after Facebook suspended him following the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. 

But the board said it was “not appropriate for Facebook to impose the indeterminate and standardless penalty of indefinite suspension.” The board said that Facebook’s “normal” policies include “removing the violating content, imposing a time-bound period of suspension, or permanently disabling the page and account.”

Facebook now must review the matter within six months, opening the door for a possible return. The board also ruled that Facebook must come up with “clear, necessary, and proportionate policies that promote public safety and respect freedom of expression.”

In response, Facebook said it was “pleased” with the decision, saying in a statement that they believe the January decision was “necessary and right.” 

“We will now consider the board’s decision and determine an action that is clear and proportionate. In the meantime, Mr. Trump’s accounts remain suspended,” Facebook said in a statement.

Michael McConnell, the co-chair of the board, said in a press conference afterward that 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.”

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“In the event of a violation, a user’s post may be removed or restricted with no future limitation with a limitation for a specific time bound period, or even in severe cases, permanently,” McConnell said. “But users and their audiences must not be left in a state of uncertainty as to time or reasons for restoration.”  

Facebook’s “Supreme Court”

The Facebook Oversight Board has 20 members who are based around the world and are lawyers, professors, journalists, and human rights activists. The committee, established by CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2019, is sometimes referred to as “Facebook’s Supreme Court” because it can overturn decisions made by company executives and its decisions are final. Mr. Trump’s case is  the tenth decision the board has handed down.

A five-member panel from the board was assigned to hear the case and produce a final opinion.

Mr. Trump’s Save America PAC put out a statement Wednesday morning from the former president trashing Congresswoman Liz Cheney and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, but did not mention the Facebook decision. 

Mr. Trump was banned from major social media platforms in the wake of the January 6 attack, when a mob of his supporters descended on the Capitol to try to stop the counting of the Electoral College votes. Lawmakers were forced to flee as rioters overtook the building for several hours. Five people died and Mr. Trump was later impeached by the House on a charge of inciting an insurrection. 

During the riot, Mr. Trump posted on Twitter and Facebook for his supporters to leave, but also repeated false claims about the election.

The Instagram account for then-President Donald Trump on Jan. 7, 2021. Facebook, which owns Instagram, suspended his accounts over statements he made during the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

“I know your pain, I know you’re hurt,” Mr. Trump said in the video. “We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election and everyone knows it, especially the other side. But you have to go home now. We have to have peace.” Later in the video, he repeated the false claim that it was a “fraudulent election.”

Facebook took down his video later that day, calling it an “emergency situation.” “We removed it because on balance we believe it contributes to rather than diminishes the risk of ongoing violence,” posted Facebook vice president Guy Rosen. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic and in the weeks leading up to and after the election, social media platforms had been flagging Mr. Trump’s posts that contained misleading information. On January 6, Facebook was the first to remove the video entirely. 

After it was removed, Mr. Trump took to Twitter, writing: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!” 

Twitter removed the post and froze his accounts for 24 hours. The following day, Twitter permanently suspended Mr. Trump’s account, as well as his campaign account. 

On January 7, Facebook suspended Mr. Trump’s account until the inauguration, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg posting that the “risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great.”

After the inauguration, Facebook turned its final decision on Mr. Trump’s account over to its Oversight Committee. 

The committee said in April that it was extending the public comment period before making a decision. According to Reuters, Facebook said it had received over 9,000 comments, more than any other case. 

In its previous decisions the Oversight Board has tended to rule in favor of “free expression.” The board has sided against the company on several high-profile cases, including a ruling to overturn Facebook’s removal of a post about the treatment of Uyghur Muslims in China. The Oversight Board has also overturned decisions to remove posts relating to nudity, COVID-19 misinformation and hate speech, while upholding a decision to remove a post that contained an ethnic slur.

“Outsourcing responsibility”

Facebook’s reliance on the board to decide a small number of challenging cases has come under fire from critics who say the company needs to be doing more to reduce the spread of dangerous misinformation and disinformation on the world’s largest social network. 

“It’s just outsourcing responsibility for the problems which are on its platform,” Carole Cadwalladr, an author and investigative journalist who first exposed the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data privacy scandal in 2018, told CBSN on Tuesday. “It’s kind of whitewashing these decisions through this body of experts,” she said, and “deflecting attention from what are the real harms of Facebook, which is not content moderation. The real harms are really its business model, these algorithms which we know amplify polarizing and hate content and lead to some of the impacts that we’ve seen.” 

Twitter has not allowed Mr. Trump back, and issued a ruling in April that it will not be archiving his tweets. But while Mr. Trump’s personal page will not be archived, Twitter has kept a record of several institutional government accounts, including those that belong to former White House press secretaries Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kayleigh McEnany. 

The @POTUS45 account, which was the official government page for the president, and the official @WhiteHouse45 account are both archived on Twitter.

Twitter CFO Ned Segal said in an interview with Yahoo Finance that there are “no changes” in their thinking on Mr. Trump’s account.

“When you step back and think about our policies, we want to work hard to be consistent, to be transparent so people know exactly what to expect from us,” Segal said. “We don’t have an oversight board like that [like Facebook]. Our team is accountable for the decisions that we make. There is no changes to anything we have talked about in the past.” 

Without a direct line to the millions of followers he used to reach on Twitter and Facebook, Mr. Trump has begun posting statements, sometimes several times per day, on a page of the Save America PAC website.