Will Trump be allowed to post QAnon conspiracies on Facebook?
Donald Trump has been allowed back on Meta’s platforms after a long time away, and people are already worried about the prospect of him sharing conspiracies online.
The former president is back on Facebook and Instagram after parent company Meta reinstated his personal account after two-year suspension following the Jan. 6 insurrection.
People are asking what kinds of content his followers can expect him to be posting.
While he’s yet to post using his reinstated account (which might have something to do with a deal he previously signed regarding Truth Social), Meta has come out to say that there will be “guardrails” in place.
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Writing in a blog post, Meta’s president of global affairs Nick Clegg said that Trump’s accounts will face “new guardrails in place to deter repeat offenses.”
However, as CNN reports, a Meta spokesperson told the publication that Trump will be able to share the same baseless claims about the 2020 election being stolen on the platform.
According to them, only if Trump made any assertions about upcoming elections and questioned their validity, then he would face action from the platform. In such cases, Facebook could limit the number of people who see the posts or reduce access to advertising tools.
There’s also the case of QAnon. Trump has been sharing messages about the conspiracy theory movement on Truth Social while being banned over the past two years.
However, Vice is reporting that posting QAnon content won’t be enough to violate Facebook’s Community Standards. Instead, it told the publication that its policies means it “removes pages, groups and Instagram accounts that represent QAnon when we identify them and disable the profiles who admin them.”
Donald Trump celebrated his return to Facebook and Instagram on Wednesday after parent company Meta announced its decision to reinstate the former president’s accounts in the “coming weeks”.
In a statement on Truth Social – where he described himself as the “favorite president” despite failing to be elected to a second term – Trump claimed that “such a thing should never again happen to a sitting president, or anybody else who is not deserving of retribution”.
Trump was banned from the platforms for two years in the wake of the attacks on the US Capitol on 6 January, 2021, fuelled by his baseless narrative that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him.
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