Former US President Donald Trump is reportedly looking to be active again on Facebook. According to US media reports, his team has officially asked parent company Meta to lift the ban. On Wednesday, Trump said on Fox News Digital that his campaign organization is in talks with Meta Platforms about his possible return to Facebook and Instagram.
The Facebook and Instagram platforms want to decide “quickly” on whether to lift the ban on former US President Donald Trump. This was indicated by the Vice President of the Facebook parent company Meta, Nick Clegg, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The decision will soon be announced.
Clegg noted that Trump was only banned for two years. The Internet company suspended Trump after expressing his opinion on the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 and the subsequent debate about the role of the voted-out president in the riot.
“We believe that the ban on President Trump’s Facebook account has dramatically distorted and inhibited public discourse,” Trump’s campaign wrote in its letter to Meta on Tuesday, according to the US broadcaster NBC News.
Clegg argued in Davos that Meta has an obligation to also allow controversial discussions on its platforms. The Silicon Valley group had originally announced the decision for January 7th. Clegg is officially responsible for the decision at Meta. A supervisory body of the group had insisted on the limitation of the block in 2021. The former Liberal Democrat Deputy Prime Minister is Meta’s chief lobbyist. Representatives of the US Democrats had specifically asked Meta in January to extend Trump’s ban.
It is uncertain if Trump will maintain this attitude in the future: his former reach on Twitter and Facebook is immense and many times larger than the almost 4.6 million followers on Truth Social. Should he run as the Republican frontrunner in the 2024 US election, his return to the biggest and most popular social media platforms is only a matter of time.
