Meta has said it is rolling back restrictions on former US President Donald Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts, as the presumptive Republican nominee seeks to regain the White House in November.
The social media company headed by Mark Zuckerberg had indefinitely suspended Trump’s accounts following his praise of people who joined the deadly storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
He had also repeatedly spread misinformation about the election results, repeating the falsehood that the vote had been marred by fraud.
The company then reinstated his accounts in early 2023, but with heightened restrictions, saying it would monitor Trump’s posts for further violations that could result in another suspension of between one month and two years.
Trump, who will face off against US President Joe Biden, will no longer be subject to the additional monitoring, Meta said on Friday.
“In assessing our responsibility to allow political expression, we believe that the American people should be able to hear from the nominees for president on the same basis,” Meta said in its announcement.
“With the party conventions taking place shortly, including the Republican convention next week, the candidates for President of the United States will soon be formally nominated,” Meta’s global affairs president Nick Clegg said in a statement.
The company said the presidential candidates remain subject to the same community standards as all Facebook and Instagram users, “including those policies designed to prevent hate speech and incitement to violence”.
Some social media experts have long criticised Meta and other platforms for failing to moderate political content, including from political candidates.
Ahead of the 2020 US presidential election, Zuckerberg appeared to support Trump, despite his inflammatory posts, dismissing complaints by Facebook staff, who staged a rare public protest.
Facebook employees had complained that the company should have acted against Trump’s posts about protests containing the phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”.
Reporting from Los Angeles, Al Jazeera’s Rob Reynolds said that social media platforms face pressure to reinstate Trump’s accounts.
“It’s interesting that [the decision] comes just a few days after Trump said on his own social media platform, Truth Social, that he intended to put Zuckerberg behind bars,” he said.
“It’s an inescapable conclusion that these two events are linked in some ways, and that Zuckerberg is seeking not to be in the bad graces of Donald Trump, whose chances of becoming president again were heightened, analysts say.”
Trump launched Truth Social in 2022.
The Biden campaign criticised Meta’s decision.
“Putting Donald Trump back on Facebook is like handing your car keys to someone you know will drive your car into a crowd and off a cliff,” said campaign spokesperson Charles Kretchmer Lutvak.
Trump’s Facebook profile has 34 million followers. His campaign regularly reposts messages originally published on Truth Social, as well as invitations to rallies and videos from his campaign.
Trump has yet to issue a statement on Facebook regarding Meta’s move. His latest Facebook posts assailed Biden and questioned the president’s capacity to run for re-election.
Trump was also banned from Twitter, now called X, in 2021.
Billionaire Elon Musk restored Trump’s account on X, formerly Twitter, shortly after buying the company in 2022, although the former president has only posted once since then.
Musk himself signalled support for Trump, donating to a political committee working to help the former president defeat Biden, according to a Bloomberg report on Friday.
It is unclear how much Musk donated to the group supporting Trump, but Bloomberg quoted anonymous sources as saying that the amount was “sizeable”.
The donation highlights the “growing influence of a technology mogul” on the US political scene, Bloomberg reported, with his conspicuous shift from being independent to being critical of the Democratic Party.
