Donald Trump will know this week if he can come back to Facebook or not

Facebook’s supervisory board announces that it will deliver its verdict on May 5 on the exclusion of Donald Trump from the social network.

It is therefore this week that we will know if Facebook was right to exclude Donald Trump for good from the social network. In a message Posted on May 3 on Twitter, the supervisory board said it will release its decision on Wednesday, May 5, at around 3 p.m. KST. The verdict will be published on its site and its decision will be binding on the social network anyway.

Initially, the supervisory board should have taken a decision much earlier, no later than April 21, but the atypical nature of the case (a private company deciding to ban a sitting chairman) and the exceptional volume of public contributions (it was announced over 9,000 comments) required a schedule adjustment, extending the deadline by two weeks.

The Oversight Board will announce its decision on the case concerning former US President Trump on its website at https://t.co/NNQ9YCrcrh on May 5, 2021 at approximately 9:00 a.m. EDT.

— Oversight Board (@OversightBoard) May 3, 2021

It was on January 21 that the examination of the case began. Peculiarity of the procedure, it was not Donald Trump who seized the supervisory board of Facebook, although he was entitled to do so, but the community site. Indeed, the American company seeks to give a legal basis to its decision, which has been widely commented on in the United States, but also beyond.

The challenge of moderation of elected politicians

This exclusion provoked a deluge of comments, favorable or hostile. Some have wondered about the power that the giants of the net have over political discourse, with the power to cut the whistle to a particular speaker. Others felt that Donald Trump should not be given preferential treatment and observed that Facebook was a private company, not a public service.

Following the insurrectionary events that occurred at the beginning of the year in Washington, while the political transition was taking place between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, many other sites also made the decision to exclude the former Republican president. However, it was his ejection from Facebook that received the most attention, given the weight Facebook has in the digital daily life of the population.

Facebook brandished its moderation rules on dangerous individuals and organisms to justify the sidelining of the former champion of the American right. The site pointed to two publications in particular, which were withdrawn. Then an emergency was brought forward to ban Donald Trump for 24 hours and then indefinitely. Instagram, a subsidiary of Facebook, followed suit.

Sign of the sensitivity of the subject, Mark Zuckerberg had split a comment: ” We feel that there are just too many risks in letting the President continue to use our service these days. “. We must remember the situation in which the American capital found itself, with rioters storming the seat of the American parliament. There were five dead.

In addition to the opinion of this “supreme court”, whose field of action is restricted to Facebook and Instagram, Facebook also wishes to adjust its moderation policy for public figures, and especially with regard to individuals. exercising electoral mandates. It is these recommendations that will perhaps be the real subject, and not so much the future of Trump on the social network.