Forget the furore over Trump - Facebook is interested only in maintaining its monopoly | John Naughton

The social network's supreme court' of 40 assorted academics, politicians and journalists to oversee the site's content is little more than a PR exercise

The day after the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January, Facebook suspended Donald Trump's account indefinitely. Two things about this decision are interesting. The first is that, as Will Oremus pointed out in a perceptive post, the decision was an overnight reversal of the policy on Trump and other political leaders that the social network has spent the past four years honing, justifying and defending. The unprecedented move, which lacks a clear basis in any of Facebook's previously stated policies, highlights for the millionth time that the dominant platforms are quite literally making up the rules of online speech as they go along."

In this context, Facebook's contorted decision-making about Trump throughout his presidency has been beyond parody. The only thing that has been consistent, until now," observes Oremus, is Facebook's determination to contort, hair-split and reimagine its rules to make sure nothing Trump posted would fall too far outside them." In the end, it took the president inciting his followers to sack the Capitol to convince Zuckerberg and co that the current context is now fundamentally different, involving use of our platform to incite violent insurrection against a democratically elected government".