Facebook’s Oversight Board said it will be upholding Facebook’s suspension of former US President Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts, for the coming two years. The board, made up of global experts separate from Facebook, will then reconsider the case and assess whether the risk to public safety has receded. The suspension came after the former president praised people engaged in violence at the Capitol in Washington, DC, on 6 January.
The board upheld the suspension but criticised its open-ended nature. Facebook said the board made a number of recommendations on how to improve its policies and processes and that it has started implementing these. The company has committed to being more transparent about the decisions it makes and how these impact users. As well as updating enforcement protocols, the company is publishing its strike system, so that people know what actions systems will take if they violate our policies. Facebook earlier launched a feature called ‘account status’, so people can see when content was removed, why, and what the penalty was.
Content from politicians will be treated the same as from anyone else
The company added that it will from now not treat content posted by politicians any differently than that from other people. “Instead, we will simply apply our newsworthiness balancing test in the same way to all content, measuring whether the public interest value of the content outweighs the potential risk of harm by leaving it up,” Facebook said.
