Trump and Facebook Are Frenemies Who Can’t Let Go
It has been two years since Facebook hit the snooze button on what to do about Donald Trump. After much dithering, Facebook said in 2021 that it suspend Trump's account for two years for goading rioters and publicly attacking the US democratic process.
With that deadline here, signs point to Trump's imminent return — bad news for public discourse but potentially great for Trump as he makes another bid for the White House.
Trump's return also would help Facebook. Much as Facebook's policy teams will agonize over the delicate balance between the protection of free speech and the safeguarding of democracy — as one of the firm's former policy directors eloquently laid out here — its priority is to shareholders who are increasingly frustrated about Facebook's financial performance. Many of those shareholders would likely be pleased to hear Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. announce the former president's return in the next week or so.
Trump's pre-suspension posts got enormous traction: millions of likes and an indirect deluge of political arguments between friends and families across millions of Facebook accounts. His return promises to bring back that flurry of interactions — and with them more advertising dollars — at a time when Facebook's user growth has been stalling and the company's shares have fallen 60% over the past 12 months.
Meta has cut 11,000 jobs as it tries to build on Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg's quixotic vision for a metaverse business, on which it pledged to spend billions of dollars. Shareholder Altimeter Capital Management has called all the investment in virtual reality “super-sized and terrifying.” With all the traffic Trump could bring, Zuckerberg now has a bone to throw his investors.
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