Russell Brand's social media accounts on platforms owned by Meta have been disabled.
It follows the 51-year-old former entertainer being sentenced earlier this week to 10 and a half years in jail for one count of rape and three counts of sexual assault. He was found guilty of charges involving four women, relating to offences between 2004 and 2009.
Meta owns Instagram and Facebook. Brand is currently in prison and is expected to serve seven years before being released on licence.
What happened on the other platform
His account on X remains active. On Wednesday evening a post appeared on it reading: "There was never a Russell Brand, according to @meta."
"Thank God for @elonmusk," the message added, referring to X's owner, before concluding: "Stay tuned."
Why the two platforms diverged
Nothing in UK law required either decision. A prison sentence does not automatically remove anyone's social media accounts, and there is no order here directing a platform to act.
What applies instead is each company's own policy. Meta has long operated a "dangerous organisations and individuals" framework that can remove the accounts of people convicted of certain serious offences, applied at the company's discretion. X, under its current ownership, has moved in the opposite direction, reinstating accounts and narrowing the grounds on which it removes them.
So the same conviction produced opposite outcomes, decided in two corporate policy documents rather than in any court.
The part that is genuinely difficult
It is worth stating the competing arguments plainly, because this is not a case with an obvious answer.
Removal reduces the reach of someone convicted of serious sexual offences, and limits the platform's role in sustaining an audience that can be monetised or mobilised. Against that: a serving prisoner is already subject to the state's restrictions, and handing private companies an additional, discretionary power to erase a person's presence is a power they also get to use in cases that are far less clear-cut.
The strongest criticism of the current arrangement is not that either company chose wrongly. It is that neither had to explain itself, and neither is obliged to apply the same standard to the next case.
Why this matters beyond one man
For readers in Bangladesh, the transferable point is about where the decision sits. When platform enforcement is policy rather than law, it is applied unevenly across countries, inconsistently between companies, and with no appeal that functions in practice.
That cuts both ways. It is why harmful accounts sometimes survive reporting, and why ordinary users occasionally lose accounts with no explanation and no route back. The same discretion produces both outcomes, and this week it produced two opposite ones from a single court case.
An account in prison is not an inactive account
One practical detail is easy to miss: Brand is in custody, yet a post appeared on his X account this week. Accounts of imprisoned people are routinely run by staff, family or supporters, and nothing about a sentence stops that. It means the question facing a platform is not whether to silence a prisoner — he is already unable to post himself — but whether an audience built before a conviction may keep being used, and by whom. That is a narrower question than it is usually argued as, and a harder one to answer with a blanket policy.
