Facebook advisory council ruled on Trump veto
The group indicated that vetoing the former president from the social network indefinitely is arbitrary.
Facebook's advisory council, created by the company itself to act as a sort of supreme court on what content should be removed from the platform, asked the company on Wednesday to review the indefinite veto of former United States President Donald Trump (2017- 2021) and gave him six months of margin for it.
Trump's accounts on Facebook and Instagram (owned by the company) remain closed since the assault on the Capitol on January 6 by thousands of supporters of the former president, some of them armed, and which left five dead.
In its decision published this Wednesday, the council said it "supports" that the accounts of the former president be blocked because his publications during the attack on the Capitol "seriously violated the rules" of use of the social network, but considered that the sanction of vetoing it indefinitely is arbitrary.
"Instead of applying one of its account-level sanctions for serious breaches, Facebook devised an indefinite suspension that is not included in its content policies. This arbitrary sanction gave Facebook full discretion over lifting or maintaining the suspension." they targeted from this independent body.
The twenty members of the council regretted that the veto took place "without criteria that can be examined by users or external observers" and, therefore, asked the company to "re-examine" its penalty and impose another one that conforms to the internal regulations of the social network based on the severity of Trump's posts and the possibility of future altercations.
This review by the company should take place over the next six months, and Facebook committed itself, from the moment the council was created in 2019, to comply with its resolutions.
If, after its reevaluation of the sanction, Facebook determines that it must lift the indefinite veto, Trump could use his Facebook and Instagram accounts again, although for the moment he remains blocked in most other social networks such as Twitter, Snap and YouTube.
