Sandberg, Facebook execs looked into banning Donald Trump in 2015

Facebook CEO Mark
Zuckerberg.
Photo by Chip
Somodevilla/Getty Images

• In 2015, Facebook executives investigated whether
  Donald Trump’s call for a ban on Muslim immigration broke the
  company’s rules, according to a bombshell new report from the
  New York Times. 
• CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly asked COO Sheryl
  Sandberg and other senior execs whether his Facebook post on
  the matter violated the social network’s rules — which could
  have earned him a ban from the platform. 
• Afterwards, a group of executives, sometimes including
  Sheryl Sandberg, are said to have scrambled to figure out the
  answer. Ultimately, Trump was not banned from
  Facebook.  
• Zuckerberg is a vocal advocate of immigration
  reform.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg once asked senior executives whether
Donald Trump had broken any of the social network’s rules,

according to a bombshell report from The New York Times — a
move that could have resulted in Facebook banning the
then-presidential candidate.

In 2015, Trump called for Muslims to be banned from entering the
United States, making a Facebook post to that effect. In
response, Zuckerberg — a vocal advocate of immigration reform,
who the Times reports was “appalled” by Trump’s remarks  —
reportedly asked top executives if the Facebook post had violated
its terms of service. 

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, DC policy head Joel Kaplan, and
then-head of communications Elliott Schrage —three very senior
executives at the firm — then scrambled to investigate the
matter, according to the report. Sandberg sat in on the
video calls to discuss, reports the Times, but did not often
speak. Zuckerberg reportedly did not appear at these
meetings. 

Kaplan warned that banning Trump, then a candidate for the
highest office in the land, could be seen as a violation of free
speech, and that it could also be cause for a conservative
backlash. 

The trio ultimately determined that Trump’s remarks didn’t break
Facebook’s rules, says the report, and his account remained
active. 

“We were trying to make a decision based on all the legal
and technical evidence before us,” Schrage, who left Facebook
this summer, told the Times. 

The incident highlights how Facebook executives were
uncomfortable with how Trump used Facebook to amplify his
often-controversial messaging — a concern shared by some others
in Silicon Valley. There have been repeated calls over the last
few years for Twitter, Trump’s social network of choice, to ban
the president over alleged rule violations. But CEO Jack Dorsey
has refused, arguing
that the president’s tweets have inherent
“newsworthiness.”

The detail was disclosed in an exhaustive report from The New
York Times, which details how Facebook executives attempted
to deflect criticism as the company’s scandals mounted over the
last few year.

In a statement, Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone told Business
Insider: “This has been a tough time at Facebook and our
entire management team has been focused on tackling the issues we
face. While these are hard problems we are working hard to ensure
that people find our products useful and that we protect our
community from bad actors.”

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