The Trump political death star on social media is now fully operational, assuming he intends on fully unleashing it.
After the former president regained access to his Twitter account last last year, Meta announced today they have restored his Facebook and Instagram accounts. Meta said that Trump no longer posed “a serious risk to public safety.”
Fox News reported:
The Facebook and Instagram pages belonging to former President Donald Trump have been restored Thursday.
Meta, who also owns and operates Facebook and Instagram, announced last month via a blog post last month that it would be ending Trump’s suspension on both social media platforms “in the coming weeks.”
Nick Clegg, president of global affairs at Meta, said at the time that the company determined Trump is no longer a “serious risk to public safety” and they had “guardrails” in place for his return.
The suspension was initially instated following the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, when the platform said it would be booting Trump “indefinitely” for his alleged involvement.
The decision to remove Trump from the platforms drew backlash across the political spectrum and was the first time a sitting president was barred from Facebook. At the time, Trump was also banned from Twitter, YouTube and Snapchat.
Twitter has restored Trump’s account, but the former president has not posted from the platform since his suspension.
This could prove critical in Trump’s bid for reelection. Facebook’s ban has harmed Trump’s ability to raise money and share his political message.
The New York Times back in May 2021 explained why Facebook is vital to Trump’s political prospects:
Facebook has increasingly become one of the most vital weapons in a political campaign’s arsenal, with its ability to juice small-dollar online-fund-raising numbers into the millions, expand and acquire contact information, help build out data on a campaign’s voter file and provide the most sophisticated advertising platform available.
Few campaigns had tapped into Facebook’s potential for advertising and fund-raising as aggressively as Mr. Trump’s. His successful 2016 campaign said its prolific use of Facebook had allowed it to send millions of different, hyper-targeted political ads to small slices of the population.
“Facebook was the method,” Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign manager in 2020 and digital director in 2016, told “60 Minutes” in 2017. “It was the highway which his car drove on.”
If Trump starts posting on Facebook and Twitter again, he will thrill his fans and trigger the woke left with his fiery posts. His return may also help him win the Presidency in 2024.