Mark Zuckerberg announces Trump banned from Facebook and Instagram for ‘at least the next two weeks’Darrell Etherington, Taylor Hatmaker/ 5:58 PM GMT+2•January 7, 2021trump zuckerbergImage Credits: David Ramos/Getty Images / Getty ImagesFacebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced via his platform that Donald Trump will be blocked from using both Facebook and Instagram “for at least the next two weeks until the peaceful transition of power is complete.” The company blocked his accounts temporarily on Wednesday following Trump’s posting of content that incited his followers to violence, but now Zuckerberg says the ban is extended “indefinitely,” extending at least until Biden takes over as president.Both Facebook and Instagram removed Trump’s video post yesterday, in which the president called for rioters who laid siege to the Capitol building in Washington to go home — but in which he also said “we love you” to the same violent terrorists. They followed that action with a 24-hour account lock, preventing Trump from posting via his Facebook and Instagram accounts during that period.Zuckerberg acknowledges that Trump content has in the past been labeled or removed when found to violate its policies, but that he had been allowed up until now to “use our platform consistent with our own rules.” He says that has now changed, due to “use of our platform to incite violent insurrection against a democratically elected government.”There’s a lot of careful, heavily PR’d language doing heavy lifting here — Zuck is careful to say that use until now has lined up with the platform’s rules in place, and not instead been an exception to them, and he’s also careful not to say Trump has directly incited violent insurrection in leaving an actor out of that particular sentence. Still, this is the strongest action by far from the platform to date to limit Trump’s access.Facebook’s decision to suspend the president’s account, even temporarily, is a shocking reversal from its longstanding attitude toward the world leader. Of course, that leader only remains in power for a few more days. With Trump out on January 20, Facebook will be dealing with President-elect Joe Biden and a Congress and administration very interested in imposing regulations on its business.Historically, Facebook has been very permissive of Trump’s bad behavior on the platform, perhaps most famously when it did nothing to the president’s account after he called for state violence against racial justice protesters. Trump’s phrasing, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” echoed the same statement famously made by a racist Miami police chief in the 1960s.