Nowhere to rant as Trump is slapped with a ban from Facebook

NAIROBI, Kenya, Jan 7- Embattled outgoing US President Donald Trump has been banned from social media, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg announced on Thursday evening.

This comes a day after Trump supporters violently stormed the US Capitol breaching the House and Senate security and momentarily disrupting the formal certification of Joseph Biden as the next US President.

Trump lost the popular and the electoral college vote however he has disputed the results with no backing evidence and used social media platforms to provoke his supporters to mass action as a protest against the results.

“We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great. Therefore, we are extending the block we have placed on his Facebook and Instagram accounts indefinitely and for at least the next two weeks until the peaceful transition of power is complete,” Zuckerberg said on his Facebook page.

The media giant said that events of the last 24 hours demonstrated that Trump intended to use his remaining time in office to undermine the “peaceful and lawful transition of power to his elected successor, Joe Biden.”

“His decision to use his platform to condone rather than condemn the actions of his supporters at the Capitol building has rightly disturbed people in the US and around the world. We removed these statements yesterday because we judged that their effect — and likely their intent — would be to provoke further violence,” he wrote.

Following the certification of the election results by Congress, the priority for the whole country must now be to ensure that the remaining 13 days and the days after inauguration pass peacefully and in accordance with established democratic norms, Zuckerberg explained.

He narrated that even though they have allowed Trump to use their platform in the last year they have been removing content or labelling his post that is in violation of the platform’s policies.

“We did this because we believe that the public has a right to the broadest possible access to political speech, even controversial speech. But the current context is now fundamentally different, involving the use of our platform to incite violent insurrection against a democratically elected government,” he said.