This illustration photo show the Facebook page of former President Donald Trump on a smartphone screen in Los Angeles, March 17, 2023.
Chris Delmas | AFP | Getty Images
Former President Donald Trump posted to Facebook on Friday for the primary time because the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, which had prompted the social media giant to place a two-year ban on the then-president’s account.
Trump, whose Facebook account was reinstated in January, was expected to return to the Meta-owned platform and Twitter after each corporations lifted their suspensions of his profiles.
Trump’s 2024 Republican presidential campaign had formally petitioned Meta to revive his Facebook account. But until the Friday afternoon post, Trump had stuck to his own platform, Truth Social, because the outlet of selection for his campaign announcements and calumnies against his political foes.
“I’M BACK!” Trump wrote in all caps in the brand new Facebook post, above a 12-second video showing the previous president speaking at a victory party on the night of his 2016 election win over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
“Sorry to maintain you waiting – complicated business. Complicated,” Trump said in that clip.
The post was Trump’s first because the day of the Capitol riot, when a violent mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol and temporarily derailed lawmakers’ efforts to substantiate President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.
No less than 1,000 people, a lot of whom were spurred by false claims of widespread election fraud that Trump had spent the previous months spreading, have been arrested on charges related to the riot, in keeping with the Department of Justice.
The 13 previous messages from Trump’s Facebook account were posted on Jan. 6, 2021. Probably the most recent one shows Trump calling on his supporters within the Capitol to “remain peaceful.”
Two posts before that, Trump slammed his own vp, Mike Pence, for lacking “the courage to do what must have been done” after Pence refused to take part in Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss by rejecting key Electoral College votes.
Earlier Friday, YouTube said it might lift its own restrictions on Trump’s account, allowing it to post latest videos.
A day after the Capitol riot, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Trump can be suspended from Facebook, writing, “We consider the risks of allowing the President to proceed to make use of our service during this era are just too great.” The corporate said in June 2021 that Trump would remain banned for 2 years.
The Republican former president is in search of the White House again in 2024 and currently holds an awesome polling lead among the many few other candidates who’re officially running within the GOP primary up to now.
In January, Meta said it might reinstate Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts, explaining in a lengthy blog post that “we default to letting people speak, even when what they must say is distasteful or factually mistaken.”
Twitter, which Elon Musk bought in a $44 billion deal last fall, moved to revive Trump’s account after the web site’s latest CEO conducted an unscientific Twitter poll on the query.
