META Meta Platforms Inc

By Paul Ziobro and Jeff Horwitz 

Facebook Inc. said it is suspending Donald Trump's accounts for two years, formalizing a long-term penalty for the former U.S. president after its independent Oversight Board said the company was wrong to keep the ban open-ended.

Facebook said it would revisit the suspension two years from the date of its initial move to suspend him on Jan. 7, the day after the riot at the U.S. Capitol. Assuming he is then reinstated, Mr. Trump will face a "strict set of rapidly escalating sanctions" if he commits further violations, including permanent removal of his pages and accounts, the company said.

"Given the gravity of the circumstances that led to Mr. Trump's suspension, we believe his actions constituted a severe violation of our rules which merit the highest penalty available under the new enforcement protocols," the company wrote in a blog post on Friday.

Facebook said it was grateful that the Oversight Board agreed with the decision to suspend Mr. Trump in the first place, and said it accepted that it needed to put in better protocols for such actions. The company said it either had already enacted or would put in place the board's recommendations for greater transparency in when it penalizes high-profile figures and when it chooses to grant exemptions from its normal enforcement. It also said it was working to offer users clearer explanations of why they were being punished when they break Facebook's policies.

In responding to the board's criticism, Facebook also opens the door for more, as the company will now be required to make more subjective decisions on whether posts from political figures violate its rules surrounding misinformation, hate speech and other issues that are hotly debated. Those judgment calls are likely to escalate partisan complaints around whether the company is being fair in how it applies the rules.

Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has long held a stance of largely not interfering with politicians' posts on its platform, saying that it wasn't up to the company to rule on what is true and isn't.

In 2016, the company set out a policy that exempted from punishment posts that violate its rules if it classifies the content as newsworthy or otherwise important to the public interest. Two years ago, amid growing controversy over posts by Mr. Trump Facebook extended that newsworthiness exemption to posts from politicians, and said it would exclude their content from its third-part fact-checking process.

On Friday, Facebook said it would no longer consider posts from politicians newsworthy by default but would make its own judgments about those that qualify, and then label those that merit the exemption.

Facebook's move on Friday came a month after the Oversight Board ruled that the social-media giant was justified in suspending Mr. Trump over certain posts related to the Jan. 6 riots in the U.S. Capitol. But it said the company must better explain its reasoning if it decides to permanently ban him from its platforms.

In the ruling, the board gave Facebook six months to determine whether Mr. Trump should be permanently banned.

"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," the board said in the decision.

Other companies have grappled with similar issues, and enacted different approaches. Twitter Inc. also grants special privileges to world leaders, and those rules allowed Mr. Trump to remain a prominent user of the platform throughout his administration, even as the company affixed many of his tweets with warning labels. The company banned him entirely after the Capitol riots and, unlike Facebook, isn't planning to review that decision further.

YouTube, a unit of Alphabet Inc., has said it doesn't grant politicians exemptions from its rules for newsworthiness. The company also suspended Mr. Trump's account in January and has said it would reinstate him when it concludes the risk of further violence has abated, though it has offered no explanation of how it will make that determination.

The pressure on tech companies is ratcheting up globally, with governments including India and Russia tightening controls over what speech is allowed, even as many foreign leaders are active users of social media to promote their agendas.

Facebook created and funded the Oversight Board to independently rule on the company's toughest content decisions.

(More to come.)

Write to Paul Ziobro at Paul.Ziobro@wsj.com and Jeff Horwitz at Jeff.Horwitz@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 04, 2021 13:32 ET (17:32 GMT)

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