After Facebook's oversight board backs the company's ban on Donald Trump, Democrats call for more.

The Biden administration keeps playing politics with COVID, and Kamala Harris makes out with her husband.

Through a mask. I'm Ben Shapiro. This is The Ben Shapiro show.

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Slash, Ben, we'll get to all the news in just one moment. First, a reminder, a few decades ago, private citizens used to be, you know, private. Well, the internet changed all of that because think of all the things you've browsed, searched for, watched, tweeted. Now imagine all of that data being crawled through and collected and aggregated by third parties into a permanent record.

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slash ben. Go to expressvpn.com slash ben to learn more. All righty. So the big story of the day

continues to be that Facebook has maintained its ban on Donald Trump. Donald Trump, as you'll

recall, was banned on January 7th from Facebook, as well as YouTube, as well as Twitter, as well as Instagram, pretty much everywhere. There's a blanket ban put on the sitting president of the United States because he said a bunch of stuff that people didn't like. And it was not clear how it had violated the rules in any substantial way, certainly no more than Ayatala Khomeini or Luis Farrakhan or a wide variety of other deplorables around the

world. But Donald Trump was banned because the tech bros decided that he was innately dangerous

and therefore he had to be banned until after the election or until after the inauguration.

And then they just were like, okay, well, I guess we'll just leave him ban. Well, the Facebook

oversight board made two decisions yesterday. One was, was the original

ban appropriate. They said yes, based on the idea that Trump had said positive things about people

doing violence, which, again, is an odd standard considering the entire Democratic Party came out

in strong defense of people doing violence and looting during the summer last year,

and continue, by the way, to defend

a wide variety of criminals as long as they are in some sort of tussle with the police. And then the Facebook Oversight Board did what Facebook didn't want them to do, and they tossed the ball back to Facebook. So Facebook set up this oversight board specifically to avoid responsibility for these sorts of things. And then the Oversight Board was like, well, You can't suspend Trump indefinitely.

So we're going to toss this back at you.

And in six months or so, you will reevaluate whether Trump ought to be put back on the platforms. Now, all of this should frighten you because the reality is that the rules are just an excuse for Facebook to kick off whoever they want to. YouTube, same sort of deal. You don't actually have to violate the rules in order for public blowback to cause YouTube or Facebook or Twitter to throw you off the internet. This is the real problem. They like to say that all of this is algorithmic, and some of it is algorithmic, but somebody sets up the algorithms. And some of it is just not algorithmic at all. When you make the decision to ban the sitting presidents of the United States from social media,

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