Trump's last post on Facebook, which now has 700K+ comments, has become a weird internet memorial where his fans and critics still converge to argue and troll
most of his preceding posts received between 20,000 and 200,000 — and new replies come in every few minutes. “We need to know you hear us,” one supporter wrote last week. https://www.latimes.com/... @latimes : Facebook — and many other social networks — banned Trump indefinitely for inciting the riots at the U.S. Capitol. Trump's Facebook account is now a time capsule of the final, chaotic days before his presidency ended. @_B_Contreras_ reports: https://www.latimes.com/... Jeff Bercovici / @jeffbercovici : Donald Trump hasn't been able to post on his Facebook page since January. That doesn't mean no one else has been. @_B_Contreras_ asks who are the people making daily pilgrimage to a strange digital shrine https://www.latimes.com/... @slpng_giants : You cannot expect a company to regulate or oversee itself. It would be ridiculous in any industry and it's patently ridiculous here. @slpng_giants : This is a good explanation by @donie, but of course it should be noted that this @OversightBoard is an illegitimate entity with non-binding decision-making and members being paid handsomely by @facebook to take the flak for the irresponsibility of this company. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Trump has been locked out of posting since Facebook banned his account indefinitely for inciting the Capitol riots, a call made under duress by Zuckerberg himself before the company outsourced the verdict to reviewers. The Oversight Board upheld the ban while faulting Facebook for dodging its questions, and Facebook answered with a suspension running to January 7, 2023.
In the meantime, his final post has kept growing on its own — replies arriving every few minutes against a normal of 20K–200K comments per post — turning a frozen account into a live arena. That matters because the Atlantic's related coverage argues Trump and Facebook have decayed together since the ban, which frames whether this comment pile is residual energy or a fading echo.
First-order effects
- Supporters are using the dead account as a petition channel — 'we need to know you hear us' — directing demands at a man who cannot reply, while critics and trolls treat the same thread as open target practice.
Second-order effects
- Facebook inherits an ungoverned engagement engine: every reply keeps the ban controversy visible and stokes the audience for the January 2023 reinstatement decision, raising the political cost of either choice.
Third-order effects
- If the mutual-decay reading holds, both sides lose from prolonged suspension — the politician's voice atrophies off-platform while the platform loses the reach that made the ban consequential — pointing toward reinstatement decisions priced more on decay curves than on principle.
The trend: Indefinite platform bans are freezing political megaphones into still-contested monuments whose influence decays for both the banned figure and the banning company.