Trump Wants To Lift His Facebook Ban. What Could That Mean?

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Former President Donald Trump wants to return to Facebook for the 2024 presidential race, and while the political advertising landscape has changed on the platform, access to his account could still give his campaign a boost.

After the formal term of Trump’s two-year Facebook ban ended on January 7, his campaign’s general counsel petitioned Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other executives to reinstate the 45th President’s profile in a letter this Sunday. An internal Meta working group has convened to discuss the issue and a spokesperson for Facebook’s parent company told CNN they will announce the resulting decision in the coming weeks.

With Trump officially running for President in 2024, regaining access to the social media platform could be a boon for his campaign, experts say—though not in the way some voters might expect from the former prolific poster.

“The most important aspect of Meta’s decision is not Trump’s ability to get his message out. I think the most important impact will be felt in terms of fundraising and organizational development,” said Tyler Brown, the former Director of Digital Strategy at the Republican National Committee. “Trump may not have changed much, but I think the political experience on Facebook has changed dramatically.”

The Trump campaign is currently banned from placing ads on Facebook, a spokesperson for the platform confirmed to TIME.

Facebook first locked Trump’s account a day after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, and determined that the suspension would last for two years, with Meta going before experts to decide whether “there are more also a serious risk to public safety” which would lead them to extend the ban.

Trump had amazing grassroots fundraising success from Facebook ads during the 2016 election. Since then, Meta has limited the capabilities of site campaigns by changing how they can target ads and how the algorithm ranks their content, and some question whether the social media platform is relevant. in politics as it was seven years ago.

But that doesn’t mean people should underestimate Trump’s reach once his profile is restored, analysts say. “Facebook is still really important to the overall information ecosystem,” said Jeff Allen, co-founder of the Integrity Institute and former member of Facebook’s integrity team.

Emails and ads

Trump’s Twitter profile may be his most iconic social media presence, but his Facebook account is probably his most useful.

For the 2016 election, Facebook “was a big part of the campaign’s data operation and bypassed traditional media outlets to energize President Trump’s voters,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung said. on Fox News. He also said that Facebook remains an important “operational tool” for the team. The Trump campaign did not respond to TIME’s request for comment.

In the 2020 election, during the COVID-19 lockdowns and curtailment of in-person events, Facebook has become an important tool for digital organizing, Brown said, along with Facebook Groups that help candidates to build their fundraising email lists and nurture communities of potential voters. Facebook has also allowed campaigns to run targeted ads with great accuracy in past presidential elections.

But after facing scrutiny for massive amounts of misinformation spread during past presidential campaigns, Facebook is trying to become less of a player in the current political environment and “take the target off their back,” according to Brown. . In doing so, it has changed several tools for campaigns making it a less important platform for advertising and list building.

Since 2020, Facebook has limited the ability of politicians to target advertising according to demographics such as region, age and political leanings. As a result, campaigns now have to spend more to get more engagement on their sponsored posts and fundraising. To reduce political content on the platform, Facebook has also changed the way it ranks posts that appear political or civic within its algorithm so fewer of them appear in users’ feeds, Allen said— which can be applied to any content Trump posts.

But while the rules of Facebook campaigning have changed, access to Trump’s 34 million profile followers—and the ability to grow that list—will still help the campaign. The platform’s user base, which is older than other social media sites like Instagram or TikTok, overlaps with a core base of Trump voters. “The Facebook audience is going to be an important constituency in the Republican primary simply because the demographics align with Republican primary voters,” Brown said.

As for Trump’s other social media accounts, Twitter CEO Elon Musk has since restored Trump’s access to his nearly 88 million followers on that site, though Trump has yet to return. Instead he posts on TRUTH Social, the platform he started after being banned from Twitter and Meta, where he has over 4.8 million followers.

-Reporting by Billy Perrigo/London

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Write to Julia Zorthian at [email protected].

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