Facebook readmits President Donald Trump to the platform, but only with one of the most ridiculous

statements of guidelines ever devised. President Biden appoints a fat activist to his 20-25

dietary guidelines advisory committee and the Biden administration plans to send tanks to Ukraine.

I'm Ben Shapiro. This is The Ben Shapiro show.

Well, Donald Trump is going to make his glorious return to Facebook.

I would assume sometime in the near future, Facebook has now released a statement saying that whose two-year ban is over.

Now, you'll recall that when Elon Musk took over Twitter, he unbanned Trump, but Trump is on

truth social.

It would undercut his own profitability in order for him to leave truth social and move over to Twitter. He basically have to admit that truth social is a dud. He hasn't done that as of yet. I would assume sometime in the near future, if in fact he wishes to run a presidential campaign, he's going to have to go where the eyeballs are and move over to Twitter. But Facebook, again, you will remember, banned Trump in coordination with Twitter

and with the other social media networks. They did that immediately after the events of January 6th,

claiming based on unspecified breaches of their protocol that Trump had to be banned.

Now, they admitted at the time that he hadn't actually done anything to formally break any of

their rules. He hadn't harassed anybody. He hadn't actually said anything that was racist to the point that it could get him banned. He had not violated any of the guidelines that Facebook had laid forth. However, they said totality of the circumstances led them to ban Trump, which was basically just a statement that they felt like banning him. And so now they were going to ban him. Well, now they're unbanning him, but, but they're setting conditions. And this shows you the evils of social media. It shows you the vagaries of the people who are setting the rules. And unlike Twitter, where Elon Musk is basically just saying, listen, I'm doing this off the top my head. You want to blame me,

blame me, go for it. Facebook pretends that they have procedures and protocols, and then they

hide behind those procedures and protocols to do whatever the hell that they want. And that is,

in fact, a lot more threatening because when you give the patina of objectivity, the patina

of algorithmic objectivity to a subjective decision to ban prominent people, what you are actively doing is deceiving the public. Musk is not deceiving the public. When he says, this person is banned, this person is readmitted, you at least know who to write the letters to. When it is meta, when it was Twitter before Musk, that was a whole different thing. And so now Facebook is claiming they have a new set of guidelines that they're going to put on Donald Trump that's going to make it easy to ban him again should they see fit to do so. So they put out a very long statement via Nick Clegg, the president of global affairs. He is the guy who is responsible for banning Trump in the first place. And he says this, quote, social media is rooted in the belief that open debate and

the free flow of ideas are important values, especially at a time when they are under threat in many places around the world. As a general rule, we don't want to get in the way of open public and democratic debate on meta's platforms, especially in the context of elections in democratic societies like the United States. The public should be able to hear what their politicians are saying, the good, the bad and the ugly, so they can make informed choices at the ballot box.

But, uh, and the ugly, so they can make informed choices at the ballot box. But, and as MC Hammer might say, here comes the big butt. That does not mean. There are no limits to what people can say on our platform. When there is a clear risk of real world harm, it's a liberally high bar for meta to intervene in public discourse, we act. What exactly does that mean? Here's where you get into the vagaries of statements like this. A clear risk of real world harm. Well, you're not saying that Donald Trump actively incited people on January 6th because the legal standard for incitement is he has to tell people, I want you to go and invade the Capitol building on January 6th. And the standard can't even be.

He said something that's generally inflammatory because if that were the standard, you'd have

to ban Kamala Harris for bailing people out of jail who are rioting.

Or half the Democratic politicians in America for lying about what happened with George Floyd

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