Meta has said it is lifting restrictions on former US President Donald Trump's Facebook and Instagram accounts as the presumptive Republican nominee seeks to reclaim the White House in November.
The social media company run by Mark Zuckerberg indefinitely suspended Trump's accounts after he praised people who joined the deadly assault on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
He had also repeatedly spread misinformation about the election results, repeating the falsehood that the vote had been marred by fraud.
The company later reinstated his accounts in early 2023, but with greater restrictions, and said it would monitor Trump’s posts for further violations that could result in another suspension of between one month and two years.
Trump, who will face US President Joe Biden, will no longer be subject to the additional surveillance, Meta said on Friday.
“As we assess our responsibility to enable political expression, we believe the American people should be able to hear from presidential nominees on the same basis,” Meta said in his announcement.
“With party conventions taking place shortly, including the Republican convention next week, the candidates for President of the United States will soon be formally nominated,” Meta’s president of global affairs Nick Clegg said in a statement.
The company said presidential candidates remain subject to the same community standards as all Facebook and Instagram users, “including policies designed to prevent hate speech and incitement of violence.”
Some social media experts have long criticized Meta and other platforms for failing to moderate political content, including that of political candidates.
Ahead of the 2020 US presidential election, Zuckerberg appeared to support Trump, despite his incendiary posts, dismissing complaints from Facebook staff who staged a rare public protest.
Facebook employees had complained that the company should have taken action against Trump's posts about the protests that contained the phrase “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
Reporting from Los Angeles, Al Jazeera's Rob Reynolds said social media platforms were facing pressure to reinstate Trump's accounts.
“It is interesting that [the decision] “This comes just days after Trump said on his own social media platform, Truth Social, that he intended to put Zuckerberg behind bars,” he said.
“It is an inescapable conclusion that these two events are somehow related, and that Zuckerberg is trying not to fall into the bad graces of Donald Trump, whose chances of becoming president again have increased, analysts say.”
Trump launched Truth Social in 2022.
Biden's campaign criticized Meta's decision.
“Putting Donald Trump back on Facebook is like handing your car keys to someone you know is going to drive into a crowd and drive them off a cliff,” said campaign spokesman Charles Kretchmer Lutvak.
Trump's Facebook profile has 34 million followers. His campaign regularly posts messages originally published on Truth Social, as well as invitations to rallies and videos from his campaign.
Trump has yet to issue any statement on Facebook regarding Meta's decision. His recent Facebook posts attacked Biden and questioned the president's ability to run for re-election.
Trump was also banned from Twitter, now called X, in 2021.
Billionaire Elon Musk restored Trump's account on X, formerly Twitter, shortly after buying the company in 2022, though the former president has only posted once since then.
Musk himself has expressed support for Trump, donating to a political committee working to help the former president defeat Biden, according to a Bloomberg report on Friday.
It's unclear how much Musk donated to the pro-Trump group, but Bloomberg cited anonymous sources who said the amount was “considerable.”
The donation highlights the “growing influence of a tech mogul” in the American political scene, Bloomberg reported, with his notable shift from independent to critic of the Democratic Party.
