Former UK Deputy Prime Minister who now serves as Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, has defended the two-year suspension of former President Donald Trump from the social media platform.
“Free speech, free expression is not a free-for-all, it’s not a recipe for anarchy. We’ve always had rules, quite rightly as Facebook that you can, in a sense, kind of say what you like on Facebook but you can’t do that if that inflicts harm on others,” Clegg told BBC News on Saturday.
Clegg suggested that Trump’s posts to the social media platform on Jan. 6 as the U.S. Capitol was breached by protesters and rioters inflicted “harm” on others.
“It’s a pretty longstanding principle it goes right back to the mid-19th Century this idea that you’re free to do things, but not if that inflicts harm on others and that is a rule that we apply—doesn’t matter whether you are the Pope, the President of the United States, whether an ordinary user—you cannot use Facebook if you want to use Facebook in a way which leads to real world imminent harm, and we think it’s crystal clear in this case that is exactly what was happening on Jan. 6 in Washington D.C,” he explained.
Trump has contested Facebook’s classification of “harm” after Zuckerberg said on Jan. 7 that Facebook removed one of Trump’s Jan. 6 videos because, according to the CEO, the president decided “to use his platform to condone rather than condemn the actions of his supporters at the Capitol building.”
In the video, Trump called on the protesters to “go home peacefully,” while saying that the Nov. 3 election was fraught with voter fraud. The president also said that “we love you,” “you’re very special,” and that “I know your pain. I know you’re hurt.”
