Trump's Facebook ban ain't pretty, but it's totally justified.

Via Flickr/Public Domain

The decision by a "governing board" within Facebook to continue the ban of former President Donald Trump is a good thing. It's also creating some bad things.

The precedent being set by this odd board of adjudicators means that future decisions have the potential to impact how you and I use the site. With as big as Facebook and Instagram are, this could potentially hurt political organizers and small business entrepreneurs, if Facebook suddenly decides to be more aggressive on its policies, with limited methods for recourse or restoration available for a person to get back on the site.

At the same time, Trump definitely deserves the ban. He's a spreader of false ideas, including the "big lie" that led to the insurrection at the Capitol in January. On his fake social media site he established this week, he continues to insist proof is just around the corner that shows he's the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election — yet no such proof exists. 

Trump's delusional ideas don't belong on a platform where millions of his loyalists will read and get red-blooded ideas about them. Trump's words have the proven ability to drive people to violence — pipe bombs targeting the media and Democrats, kidnapping plots, and the attack on Congress itself are but a small number of the dozens of cases where people have acted violently because of something the former president said.

Facebook has to do better with how it treats cases like Trump's. But that doesn't mean its actions this week were wrong.

Trump violated theirs and other sites' terms of services, and continued to instigate violence during and after the attack of the Capitol. He continues to push falsehoods that inspired that violence to begin with. The longer he's kept off of social media, the better.

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