Facebook to extend Trump ban pending review

Facebook’s ban on former President Trump will be extended pending a review by the platform’s independent oversight body.

“We believe our decision was necessary and right,” Nick Clegg, a Facebook vice president, wrote in a blog post Thursday. “Given its significance, we think it is important for the board to review it and reach an independent judgment on whether it should be upheld.”

Facebook’s oversight board will issue a decision on whether to uphold or reverse the ban in the next 90 days.

The independent body first started picking up cases last October.

The group was previewed in 2018 as a way to oversee the platform’s content moderation decisions. The oversight board is set up as a separate company from Facebook and funded through an independent trust.

Facebook made the decision to temporarily ban Trump on Jan. 7 after posts they deemed to have incited the deadly insurrection on Capitol Hill one day earlier.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the time that the ban would last at least until President Biden’s inauguration on Wednesday.

The oversight board announced shortly after the referral that it would hear the case.

Facebook’s call was made amid a flurry of bans from other social media sites, most notably Twitter, which chose to permanently ban the former president.