Donald Trump is now banned for two years from posting on Facebook, a fitting sentence for a dishonest politician who repeatedly abused the platform's policies. Equally important is the decision by an independent standards commission to overrule Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and declare that politicians must follow the same rules as everyone else regarding adherence to facts when posting and not engage in deliberately inflammatory behavior.

Trump's two-year suspension is reasonable in the sense that it punishes him for past behavior but is not so severe as to block him from returning to Facebook well ahead of the 2024 presidential race. At the same time, Facebook regulators issued an unprecedented, stern warning that if Trump resumes his past behavior, far more severe punishment would follow, including a possible lifetime ban.

Twitter already has imposed a well-earned permanent suspension on the former president for multiple tweets deemed not only to have spread misinformation but also to have contributed to the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. Twitter said it viewed Trump's potential for future "glorification of violence" to be too high to risk imposing only a temporary ban. Since he continued inflammatory tweets even in the wake of the Jan. 6 events, Twitter shut down his account and removed all his previous tweets.

Trump's statements "can be mobilized by different audiences, including to incite violence, as well as in the context of the pattern of behavior from this account in recent weeks," Twitter stated on Jan. 8.

Facebook used similar language in its Friday announcement of Trump's two-year suspension, specifically citing his praise of the insurrectionists. If Trump still fails to exercise self-restraint, Facebook Vice President Nick Clegg wrote in a blog post, the company appears prepared to impose harsher sanctions — even apparently if the ex-president makes inflammatory remarks in a forum other than Facebook.

Knowing Trump, the threat of a permanent ban is not likely to make him stop lying or provoking acts of public outrage by his followers. His constant, ongoing references to nonexistent election fraud in the 2020 presidential vote seem designed to keep his supporters whipped up and mobilized for violent action.

It's not clear how Facebook's broader decree clamping down on rule-breaking politicians might affect those who posted misinformation but were allowed to keep their posts online because of their special political status. That doesn't just mean American politicians but also populist rabble-rousers like Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India or Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. Zuckerberg had favored giving such politicians a pass — a double standard that only encouraged greater abuse.

Free speech is a cherished right that this newspaper wholeheartedly embraces. But like all other rights, if it is abused repeatedly, it can become more of a tool of oppression than an enabler of the free exchange of ideas.

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