One of Donald Trump’s first acts on moving into the White House in January 2017 was to hang a portrait of Andrew Jackson, the former U.S. President and known racist, in the Oval Office. (Trump would later also lay a wreath on Jackson’s grave in Tennessee and block the Treasury Department’s plan to replace Jackson on the $20 bill with the image of renowned anti-slavery activist Harriet Tubman.)

Biden wanted “to walk into an Oval that looked like America and started to show the landscape of who he is going to be as President.”

When Joe Biden moved into the Oval Office on January 20, 2021, even before signing his first seventeen executive orders and directives, he had the Jackson portrait removed and replaced with a portrait of founding father Benjamin Franklin. He also installed sculptures of César Chávez, Rosa Parks, and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. 

The bust of labor union organizer Chávez, by artist Paul A. Suarez, sits on a small table behind the Resolute desk, looking down on photos of Biden’s family. The bust of civil rights activist Parks is by Detroit-based artist Artis Lane, whose 2009 bust of Sojourner Truth is also featured in the nearby U.S. Capitol. The bust of King, by Charles Henry Alston, was the first image of an African American ever displayed in the White House, when it was initially placed there in 1990.

Biden’s choices of these symbols are not arbitrary. On his first day in office, Biden proposed legislation to allow migrant farmworkers access to “green cards” for legal work status. Paul Chávez, son of the late labor leader, told CNN, “It represents the hopes and aspirations of an entire community that has been demonized and belittled, and we hope this is the beginning of a new day, a new dawn in which the contributions of all Americans can be cherished and valued.”

Biden has often quoted King, and did so again on his personal Twitter feed on January 18, saying the late civil rights leader’s “words remind us that darkness cannot drive out darkness and hate cannot drive out hate.”

As a U.S. Senator, Biden was a cosponsor of the 2005 resolution to allow Rosa Parks to lie in honor in the U.S. Capitol after her October death (the first woman ever to be so honored), and in January 2006 he cosponsored the bill to issue a commemorative postage stamp in her honor. 

Just this past December, in an “off-the-record” Internet conversation, Biden reportedly told a group of supporters, “Sixty-five years after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, the definition of ‘civil rights’ should be expanded to include the rights of women, Hispanics, Asians, Muslims, immigrants, the elderly, the LGBTQ community, the mentally ill, the physically impaired, and others.” 

Biden wanted “to walk into an Oval that looked like America and started to show the landscape of who he is going to be as President,” deputy director of Oval Office operations Ashley Williams told The Washington Post.

The portrait of Franklin, deemed to represent Biden’s interest in following the guidance of science (although it is worth noting that Franklin also founded the U.S. Postal Service, which Trump attacked), and a bust of Eleanor Roosevelt, former first lady and architect of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, also send a message about the new President’s priorities.

Elsewhere in the room, facing the desk, a portrait of former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is hung—perhaps to remind the room’s new occupant of the history of a Democratic President who came into office at a time of both economic and social crisis and united a nation with government-sponsored programs that rebuilt a society.

Joe Biden has quickly managed to install the right symbols. Now he will need the courage, perseverance, and support that it will take to transform a wounded and bitterly divided nation.

Shortly before this year’s presidential election, Facebook — chastened by public opinion and congressional hearings — announced that it would cease all political ads in order to slow the flood of misinformation and disinformation that abounded on its platform. That made sense, given the power the social media website had over public opinion. 

But, more ominously, the platform with more than 2.7 billion active monthly users also announced that, beginning at 12:01 a.m. on Nov. 4, the day after the election, it would ban all ads “about social issues, elections and politics in the U.S.” for an indefinite period. 

Now, a month after the election, that ban remains in effect. And it impacts a good deal more than what people commonly think of as ads.

Most notably, this ban applies to paid promotion of posts and articles—the way many publications gain new readers and new audiences for their content. This is a tool used by publications including The Progressive, a 111-year-old political magazine based in Wisconsin. As the magazine’s publisher, that makes me deeply concerned.

The Progressive has an active following on social media, especially Facebook. But due to these restrictions, we are no longer able to promote our articles and gain new audiences for the high-quality, fact-based reporting that our writers produce. 

This is not the first time that progressive news websites have had trouble with Facebook’s restrictions. In 2018, I reported on our attempts to publicize a public screening of four award-winning films. Facebook initially refused the ad, but later relented with no explanation. 

In 2019, Mother Jones magazine issued a report showing significant loss in site visits (and revenue) due to a tiny change in Facebook’s algorithm for driving traffic. The findings in the Mother Jones report were confirmed this past October by The Wall Street Journal.

But not only Mother Jones was affected. Facebook’s rules affect all publishers who produce content that addresses social and political issues.

Facebook claims it is trying to restrict falsehoods and promote truth on its platform. So I decided to test this premise. On Nov. 19, we published an op-ed by our editor, Bill Lueders, about the importance of truth in journalism.

“We face a common enemy: the preponderance of lies. We also share a common goal: to make truth matter,” Lueders wrote. “Our obligation as journalists and opinion leaders is to insist that truth is knowable, and deserves more fidelity than falsehoods.”

Below this article on our Facebook page is a small box where Facebook asks “Do you want to ‘boost’ this post?” I clicked yes, and filed in the necessary information to make the post available (once I had paid by credit card) to other potentially interested readers who are not “followers” of our page but have similar interests. 

Within a few hours, the message came back from the Facebook ads team: “Your ad was rejected because it doesn’t comply with our advertising policies.”

In an online update on Nov. 11, Facebook said, “The temporary pause for ads about politics and social issues in the U.S. continues to be in place as part of our ongoing efforts to protect the election. Advertisers can expect this to last another month, though there may be an opportunity to resume these ads sooner. We will notify advertisers when this pause is lifted.”

If Facebook truly wants to “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together,” as it claims in its mission statement, perhaps it should consider allowing fact-based, truth-seeking publications to share content with other interested audiences. 

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This column was produced for the Progressive Media Project, which is run by The Progressive magazine, and distributed by Tribune News Service.