
(PresidentialWire.com)- Even if former President Donald Trump officially launches a 2024 presidential campaign before the midterm elections, Facebook said it won’t change its timeline to review whether to reinstate him to their social media platforms.
A top executive at the company recently informed Politico of this decision. That means Facebook will stick to its initial decision of not reviewing whether to reinstate Trump until after this year’s midterm elections in November. They’ll do this even if he becomes an official presidential candidate before that time.
The official also said that the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago won’t affect its timeline, either.
The company originally set a date of January 7 of 2023 to decide whether they will reinstate Trump to their platforms. The former president was banned from Facebook after the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021, for violating its policy on incitement of violence.
Many conservatives have said for a while now that Facebook — and its parent company Meta — have been unfairly silencing Trump. If he were to announce his candidacy for president, the pressure on Meta to move up its timeline and make a decision quicker would certainly be turned up to a new level.
Many of Trump’s critics, though, have said that he should be permanently banned from Facebook, much like he has been from Twitter.
The remarks about Facebook’s timeline for a decision came from Meta’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg. They accompanied a full plan that Facebook released for how they will address misinformation and advertising for the midterm elections.
Much of that plan is similar to what it did during the 2020 presidential election, when so many people believe the social media platform was unable to properly stamp out misinformation.
There are only three months until the very important midterm elections, and social media companies are doing their best to come up with a solid plan now to be prepared.
Twitter, for example, last week released their own plan. They said they would already start to label any false information posted about voting on their site. It’s something they did during the 2020 presidential election as well.
Google, meanwhile, updated their algorithm so that search results that come from authoritative sources would be prioritized on their site.
Social media and Big Tech companies have been working hard to battle misinformation on their platforms ever since the massive amount of disinformation that was posted before the 2016 presidential election.
They put new policies in place to combat that, and to tamp down any threats of violence as well. They were all put to the test following the Capital insurrection in January 2021, and that led to Trump being suspended, temporarily banned, indefinitely banned and permanently banned on numerous platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Because Trump no longer had these platforms to rely on to speak directly to his followers, he started his own social media company, Truth Social.
While that platform got off the ground earlier this year, it still doesn’t have the power or the sheer number of people that a massive social media platform like Facebook does.