The HILL REPORTS:
FACEBOOK OVERSIGHT ACTIVATED: Facebook’s ban on former President Trump will be extended pending a review by the platform’s independent oversight body.
“We believe our decision was necessary and right,” Nick Clegg, a Facebook vice president, wrote in a blog post Thursday. “Given its significance, we think it is important for the board to review it and reach an independent judgment on whether it should be upheld.”
Facebook’s Oversight Board, which started taking cases in October, will make a decision on the ban in the next 90 days.
Facebook made the decision to temporarily ban Trump on Jan. 7 after posts they deemed to have incited the deadly insurrection on Capitol Hill one day earlier.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the time that the ban would last at least until President Biden’s inauguration on Wednesday.
PARLER DENIED: A federal judge turned down Parler’s request for a court order that would have forced Amazon Web Services to immediately resume hosting the social media platform.
U.S. District Court Judge Barbara Rothstein wrote in the decision that Parler’s claims “at this time are both inaccurate and unsupported.”
Amazon’s decision to drop Parler after the deadly insurrection at the Capitol Jan. 6 left the platform dark until this past Sunday, when a nonfunctional homepage appeared back on the web along with a note from the company’s CEO John Matze saying that a return was “inevitable.”
