A video includes archive material announcing Trump’s ban from Twitter and images of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and of a desktop, overlaid by captions: “In a time of silence and lies, a beacon of freedom arises. A place to speak freely and safely. Straight from the desk of Donald J Trump.”

Below the video are a series of Trump statements resembling blogposts, of which the most recent begins: “Heartwarming to read new polls on big-shot warmonger Liz Cheney of the great State of Wyoming.”

Cheney is under fire from fellow Republicans loyal to Trump’s claims that he actually won the 2020 election, because she publicly calls out the lie and has strongly criticised the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol by extremist Trump supporters.

Tabs on Trump’s new website allow users to like or share the posts on their own Facebook or Twitter accounts, but there is no option for them to reply.

Visitors are also invited to “sign up for alerts”, so that Trump’s musings can be beamed directly into their inboxes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, options to “shop” and “contribute” figure prominently.

A footnote says the tool is funded jointly by the ex-president’s Save America and Make America Great Again political action committees.

When the page was unveiled on Tuesday, social media erupted with comment – and mockery – suggesting that Trump’s long-awaited return to social media owed much to platforms such as Blogger, launched in 1999.

But Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the former president, sought to provide a clarification – via Twitter.

“President Trump’s website is a great resource to find his latest statements and highlights from his first term in office, but this is not a new social media platform,” he wrote. “We’ll have additional information coming on that front in the very near future.”

Twitter announced it had banned Trump permanently after the US Capitol attack for breaking its “glorification of violence” rules.

Facebook also banned him, with its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, saying “the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great”.

But Facebook’s independent oversight board is expected to announce on Wednesday whether it is overturning the suspension.

In the meantime Trump, exiled at his private Mar-a-Lago residence and club in Palm Beach after leaving office in defeat and disgrace, has been sending press releases to journalists.

They are often in a style reminiscent of his tweets, with capital letters, exclamation marks and misspellings. But they no longer drive the day’s agenda or cable news chyrons as his presidential missives once did.

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Facebook Board Votes to Continue Trump Ban

The Hill- Facebook’s ban on former President Trump’s account will continue following a decision issued by its independent oversight board Wednesday.

“The Board found that, in maintaining an unfounded narrative of electoral fraud and persistent calls to action, Mr. Trump created an environment where a serious risk of violence was possible,” the board wrote in a statement.

While the board did uphold the suspension, it also found that the indefinite suspension was not appropriate.

The panel is requesting that Facebook review the decision to develop a “proportionate response that is consistent with the rules that are applied to other users of its platform.”

“Within six months of this decision, Facebook must reexamine the arbitrary penalty it imposed on January 7 and decide the appropriate penalty,” it said.

Trump has been suspended from the platform since earlier this year on the basis of posts made surrounding the deadly insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

A spokesperson for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The decision will leave Trump with limited ways to reach the public in the same way he did while president.

Trump has been issuing statements to the press via email, and while many of them have been shared on social media widely, his reach and dominance over news cycles has clearly diminished.

The former president launched a feature on his personal website Tuesday that essentially amounts to a blog that would let his dedicated fans disseminate short posts to the social media sites that had banned him.

Unlike Facebook’s delayed decision on whether to reinstate Trump’s accounts, other social media platforms including Twitter permanently banned his account shortly after the posts about the insurrection.

The decision is the most consequential ruling the academics, former politicians, legal experts and journalists that make up the oversight board have weighed in on since Facebook launched the independent body.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to leave the fate of Trump’s Facebook account up to the Oversight Board drew widespread criticism from tech critics on the right and left.

“The real concern is not Facebook’s Trump decision but the way in which this powerful corporation is attempting to dodge accountability by engaging in covert influence schemes to shape public opinion and policy. This compromised Board is only going to make governance and effective regulation even more difficult,” said Jennifer Grygiel, an assistant professor of communications at Syracuse University.

The board has 20 members, and will be doubled in size when fully staffed. Facebook made an initial commitment of $130 million for a trust to cover operation costs of the board, but the board has its own staff independent from the social media giant.

The Real Facebook Oversight Board, a group of tech advocates that formed after the launch of the Oversight Board, slammed Facebook’s referral of the decision to the Oversight Board as a “PR stunt.”

“Obviously Donald Trump has violated Facebook’s terms of service repeatedly, incited hate, spread disinformation, fomented violence and been used as a model for other authoritarian leaders to abuse Facebook. He should be banned forever,” the group said in a statement before the ruling was issued.

“But do not let Facebook’s Oversight Board distract from the need to ensure real accountability for hate speech, election lies, disinformation and other harmful content,” they continued.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who led efforts to challenge election results ahead of the insurrection at the Capitol, also dismissed the oversight process.

“I don’t think any one company should have this kind of power over speech, over data, over news and information. Facebook has tremendous power. I have no idea, of course, what the decision of their oversight board will be and I think what it is is less important than the sheer amount of power they exercise and, of course, the total lack of transparency,” Hawley said during a Washington Post Live event on Tuesday.

But Adam Kovacevich, executive director of Chamber of Progress, a coalition representing tech giants including Facebook, said the Oversight Board process allowed more voices to weigh in on the decision.

“Facebook and all platforms have a First Amendment right to allow or disallow any speech they want, whether or not they have an advisory board. But the task of balancing political speech versus the political violence of January 6th is challenging enough to draw 9,000 public comments, and the Oversight Board process has brought a lot of voices into the debate,” Kovacevich said Tuesday.