SAN FRANCISCO: Facebook’s operations chief Sheryl Sandberg said the world’s largest social network had no plans to lift its block on the accounts of US President Donald Trump.
While speaking during a conference, Sandberg, said she was glad that Facebook had frozen Trump’s accounts, which came as tech giants scrambled to crack down on his baseless claims about fraud in the US presidential election amid riots in Washington last week.
Hours later, the company banned the phrase “stop the steal” altogether, citing use of the term to organize events contesting the outcome of the US presidential election. If Trump wanted to appeal the removal of his content that could happen through the company’s new Oversight Board, she added.
Facebook said Trump could not appeal the actual suspension through the board. “This shows the president is not above the policies we have,” Sandberg said.
Facebook executives have long taken a light touch to policing speech posted by politicians, maintaining that people have a right to see statements from their leaders. The company backed down on that position and started applying labels to the president’s posts after facing a backlash when it declined to act against Trump’s incendiary rhetoric around anti-racism protests throughout the United States.
READ MORE: Twitter, Facebook suspends Trump’s social media accounts
It reversed course and banned Trump indefinitely following last week’s riots, which culminated in the storming of the US Capitol. Sandberg acknowledged that Facebook may have missed some of those posts but said she believed the events were largely organized on other platforms.
She said the company was keeping an eye on further possible armed protests being planned for Washington, D.C. and at all 50 US state capital cities in the run-up to President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration on January 20, which has prompted an FBI warning.
Sandberg has played a less prominent public role at Facebook in the past year, even as CEO Mark Zuckerberg has thrown himself into the public sphere with a series of livestreamed chats and multiple sessions testifying before Congress.
The two have also faced questions about their future at Facebook following the mid-year return of Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, who had left the year prior citing vague differences over the company’s direction. When asked about the future for herself and Zuckerberg at Facebook, Sandberg said both were staying put in their current roles.
Sandberg also denied reports that she had been sidelined as Zuckerberg took a more active role in content policy and government relations, her traditional areas of responsibility.
“People love headlines about corporate drama, and I think it’s fair to say they particularly love headlines about sidelining women. But I just feel tremendously lucky to have this job because there is so much good,” she said.
Sandberg said regulatory pressure on U.S. tech companies around antitrust issues was “very real,” cautioning similar scrutiny two decades ago was a “major distraction” for Microsoft and caused it to miss the next phase of technology development.
