President Trump still refuses to publicly acknowledge that he lost the 2020 election, but in any event he and his administration will lose access to the White House accounts on Facebook and Instagram in less than two months.
Facebook confirmed that as of Jan. 20, 2021, when president-elect Joe Biden is sworn in as the 46th U.S. president, the official White House accounts on both Facebook — including @WhiteHouse, @POTUS and @FLOTUS — and those on Instagram will be transferred to the Biden administration.
Twitter also previously said that on Inauguration Day, @POTUS and other handles will be moved over to the Biden team.
“In 2017, we worked with both the Obama Administration and incoming Trump Administration to make sure the transition of their Facebook and Instagram accounts was seamless on January 20th, and we expect to do the same here,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement to Reuters.
Trump’s personal accounts on Facebook and Instagram will not be affected with the White House transition.
Trump has relentlessly used social media to spread disinformation, including continuing to baselessly insist that the 2020 election was widespread voter fraud. The Trump legal team, led by Rudy Giuliani, has lost more than 30 cases related to the outgoing president’s attempts to change the results of the election.
In the past two weeks, Facebook has tagged numerous Trump posts — in which he has claimed voter fraud or otherwise raised conspiracy theories questioning the validity of the 2020 election — with messages pointing out that Biden is the projected winner of the election.
Facebook has added the warning labels to Trump’s posts under a policy adopted this summer, a change from CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s previously insistance his company would not “fact check” politicians. Under the current policy, Trump’s posts will remain subject to fact checking once he no longer occupies the White House.
Twitter, meanwhile, will remove the special exemption for @realDonaldTrump — under which it leaves up tweets by political leaders that would otherwise violate Twitter’s usage policies — when Trump becomes a private citizen in January.
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