Did Facebook and Instagram reinstate former President Donald Trump's Facebook and Instagram accounts on June 2, 2021? No, that's not true: There was no change in the status of Trump's social media accounts, Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said in a tweet on June 2, 2021. Trump's ability to post new content was suspended by Facebook in the wake of the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, although his old posts remain online.
The claim appeared on a wide range of social media posts, including a tweet (archived here) posted by a CBS reporter on June 2, 2021. It read:
The last post on Trump's now-reinstated Facebook account:
This is what the post looked like on Twitter at the time of writing:
(Source: Twitter screenshot taken on Wed Jun 2 22:23:47 2021 UTC)
It was not immediately clear what triggered the false rumor that Trump had been restored to Facebook and Instagram. It was quickly countered by Facebook's spokesman Andy Stone on Twitter:
No. Nothing about the status of President Trump's presence on our platform has changed. He remains indefinitely suspended.
-- Andy Stone (@andymstone) June 2, 2021
The page was never down: archive.is (a site that lets you take snapshots of what a site looked like on a particular moment in time) has snapshots of the page for several days between January 6 2021 and now. This is what it recorded for January 26, 2021:
This is a link to the Trump Facebook page.
Trump's Instagram account likewise was screenshotted on January 16, 2021: https://archive.is/JF2L9
Trump's Instagram page can be found here.
(Editors' Note: Facebook is a client of Lead Stories, which is a third-party fact checker for the social media platform. On our About page, you will find the following information:
Since February 2019 we are actively part of Facebook's partnership with third party fact checkers. Under the terms of this partnership we get access to listings of content that has been flagged as potentially false by Facebook's systems or its users and we can decide independently if we want to fact check it or not. In addition to this we can enter our fact checks into a tool provided by Facebook and Facebook then uses our data to help slow down the spread of false information on its platform. Facebook pays us to perform this service for them but they have no say or influence over what we fact check or what our conclusions are, nor do they want to.)
