Mark Zuckerberg Photograph:( Reuters )
Bannon suggested in a video posted on November 5 that FBI Director Christopher Wray and government infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci should be beheaded, saying they had been disloyal to Trump.
Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has said former Trump White House advisor Steve Bannon did not violate enough of the company's policies to justify his suspension when he urged beheading two senior US officials.
Zuckerberg was speaking on the issue at a weekly forum with Facebook employees where he is sometimes asked to defend content and policy decisions. A staff member had asked why Bannon had not been banned.
Zuckerberg acknowledged criticism of Facebook by President-elect Joe Biden but said the company shared some of the Biden team's same concerns about social media. He urged employees not to jump to conclusions about how the new administration might approach regulation of social media companies.
Bannon suggested in a video posted on November 5 that FBI Director Christopher Wray and government infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci should be beheaded, saying they had been disloyal to the incumbent US president - Donald Trump, who last week lost his re-election bid to Biden.
"I'd put the heads on pikes. Right. I'd put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats. You either get with the program or you are gone," Bannon said in the video.
Facebook removed the video but left up Bannon's page, which has about 175,000 followers. Twitter banned Bannon last week over the same content.
"We have specific rules around how many times you need to violate certain policies before we will deactivate your account completely," Zuckerberg said. "While the offences here, I think, came close to crossing that line, they clearly did not cross the line."
Facebook spokesman Andy Stone said the company would take further action against Bannon's page "if there are additional violations."
Last Friday, Facebook took down a network of other Bannon-linked pages that were pushing false claims about the presidential election, after they were flagged to the world's biggest social media company by activist group Avaaz.
Avaaz said seven of the largest pages had amassed nearly 2.5 million followers. Stone said Facebook had removed "several clusters of activity for using inauthentic behavior tactics to artificially boost how many people saw their content."
Trump's chief White House strategist, Bannon, had helped articulate his "America First" policy. Trump fired him in August 2017, ending his turbulent tenure.