Facebook Inc. said today that the accounts of former President Donald Trump will remain suspended until at least Jan. 7, 2023.

The decision is a response to recommendations made by the company’s Oversight Board. Last month, the board upheld Facebook’s Jan. 7 decision to suspend Trump from Facebook and Instagram.

In a statement accompanying the decision, the board criticized the company by saying that “it was not appropriate for Facebook to impose the indeterminate and standardless penalty of indefinite suspension.” In response, the social network has set a time frame for the suspension, saying it would be enforced for two years effective from Jan. 7. 

Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, wrote in a blog post today that “in establishing the two-year sanction for severe violations, we considered the need for it to be long enough to allow a safe period of time after the acts of incitement, to be significant enough to be a deterrent to Mr. Trump and others from committing such severe violations in future, and to be proportionate to the gravity of the violation itself.”

Facebook established the Oversight Board in 2020 to review content moderation policies. “It was established as an independent body to make binding judgments on some of the most difficult content decisions Facebook makes, and to offer recommendations on how we can improve our policies,” Clegg wrote. “As today’s announcements demonstrate, we take its recommendations seriously and they can have a significant impact on the composition and enforcement of Facebook’s policies.”

The company today also announced that it would share more information with the public about how it enforces content rules across its platform. As part of the effort, Facebook has published a explainer with details about what actions its systems take in response to content that violates the rules.

Additionally, the company will start providing more information about its newsworthiness allowance. Newsworthiness allowance is a term Facebook uses in connection with user content that is deemed newsworthy or important to the public interest and is therefore allowed to stay on its platform even if it might otherwise violate community standards. Moving forward, the company said, it will begin publicly “publishing the rare instances when we apply” such exceptions.

The company earlier disclosed plans to remove a controversial policy shielding politicians from the content moderation rules that apply to other users. “We will simply apply our newsworthiness balancing test in the same way to all content, measuring whether the public interest value of the content outweighs the potential risk of harm by leaving it up,” Clegg elaborated today.  

Photo: Facebook