A member of Facebook’s independent Oversight Board said Thursday that the platform invented new, unfair rules to justify banning former President Donald Trump indefinitely, in ways that other users haven’t been punished before.
Facebook’s independent Oversight Board announced Wednesday that Trump will remain banned from the company’s platform after his accounts on Facebook and Instagram were suspended indefinitely following his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“Facebook invented their own sanctions as they looked into this particular user, Trump,” former Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, a Board member, said during an interview with Axios on Thursday.
“Why is this user, Trump, any more special than anyone else? To be punished differently, in ways Facebook chooses to,” Thorning-Schmidt said.
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Thorning-Schmidt said the Board disagreed with Facebook’s decision to impose a permanent ban on Trump’s account, which was not an option in their community guidelines when the platform made the decision to suspend Trump in early January indefinitely. The company invented a new rule, she said, to explain why Trump was permanently banned rather than given a temporary suspension with the possibility of returning to the platform if he changed his online activity.
Trump may yet be able to return to Facebook because the Board said it was “not appropriate” for the platform to impose a permanent ban on him and gave the company six months to review Trump’s suspension once again to justify “a proportionate response that is consistent with the rules that are applied to other users of its platform.”
The European leader said that Facebook must make its content moderation decisions transparent and clear so that all users are judged by the same standards.
“All users have the right to free speech. They also can’t step over Facebook’s community standards, and they also have the right for the sanctions and penalties that Facebook has in place, not new ones that Facebook invents,” she said.
Thorning-Schmidt also said Facebook’s decision to refer Trump’s account ban to the Board was “lazy” and that the Board was not created to lift responsibility off Facebook or help them justify new rules it creates along the way.
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Overall, Thorning-Schmidt agreed with the decision the Board made to continue banning Trump from Facebook and said three times during the interview that “free speech is not absolute,” saying that users, particularly powerful ones like Trump, can’t post content that could cause violence or harm.
