The board said Facebook was right to suspend Trump in the immediate aftermath of the January 6th insurrection, but said Facebook couldn’t just make the suspension “indefinite” with no actual rule on its books allowing for that. The board said Facebook must review the decision and figure out if Trump should be banned from the platform forever.
The board could have made that decision itself, but by choosing to hand the decision back to Facebook it once again puts Zuckerberg’s powerful role in overseeing public discourse in the United States in the spotlight, along with the arbitrary nature of how Facebook moderates it platform.
Facebook has six months from today to decide Trump’s fate.
Notably, the board also told Facebook it needed to consider several other measures, including “a comprehensive review of Facebook’s potential contribution to the narrative of electoral fraud and the exacerbated tensions that culminated in the violence in the United States on January 6.”
The board said such a review “should be an open reflection on the design and policy choices that Facebook has made that may allow its platform to be abused.”
