WASHINGTON (AP) — Facebook has removed a campaign ad by President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence that featured an upside-down red triangle, a symbol once used by Nazis to designate political prisoners, communists and others in concentration camps.
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The company said in a statement Thursday that the ads violated “our policy against organized hate.” A Facebook executive who testified at a House Intelligence Committee hearing on Thursday said the company does not permit symbols of hateful ideology “unless they’re put up with context or condemnation.”
“In a situation where we don’t see either of those, we don’t allow it on the platform and we remove it. That’s what we saw in this case with this ad, and anywhere that that symbol is used, we would take the same action,” said Nathaniel Gleicher, the company’s head of security policy.
The Trump campaign spent more than $10,000 on the ads, which began running on Wednesday and targeted men and women of all ages across the U.S., though primarily in Texas, California and Florida.
In a statement, Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said the inverted red triangle was a symbol used by antifa so it was included in an ad about antifa. He said the symbol is not in the Anti-Defamation League’s database of symbols of hate. The Trump campaign also argued that the symbol is an emoji.
“But it is ironic that it took a Trump ad to force the media to implicitly concede that Antifa is a hate group,” he added.
Antifa is an umbrella term for leftist militants bound more by belief than organizational structure. Trump has blamed antifa for the violence that erupted during some of the recent protests, but federal law enforcement officials have offered little evidence of this.
The ADL disputed that the red triangle was commonly used as an antifa symbol. The organization said the triangle was not in its database because it is a historical symbol and the database includes only those symbols used by modern-day extremists and white supremacists.
“Whether aware of the history or meaning, for the Trump campaign to use a symbol — one which is practically identical to that used by the Nazi regime to classify political prisoners in concentration camps — to attack his opponents is offensive and deeply troubling,” ADL chief executive officer Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement.
The action comes as Facebook and other technology companies face persistent criticism, particularly from Democrats, about whether they are doing enough to police the spread of disinformation and tweets and posts from Trump perceived as inflammatory.
Those questions arose during Thursday’s hearing when a Twitter representative was asked why the company flagged but did not remove tweets from the president, including one that raised the prospect of shooting looters during the recent unrest in American cities. Facebook, too, was asked why it did not remove a doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., last year that appeared to show her slurring her words.
“If we simply take a piece of content like this down, it doesn’t go away,” Gleicher said. “It will exist elsewhere on the internet. People who are looking for it will still find it.”
With Thursday’s hearing focused on the spread of disinformation tied to the 2020 election, the companies said they had not yet seen the same sort of concerted foreign influence campaigns like the one four years ago, when a Russian troll farm sowed discord online by playing up divisive social issues.
But that suggests the threat has evolved rather than diminished, said the executives, who pointed out that media companies controlled by the state were directly and openly engaging online on American social issues to affect public opinion. China, for instance, has likened allegations of police brutality in the U.S. to the criticism it faced for its aggressive treatment of protesters in Hong Kong last year.
Preventing disinformation ahead of the election is a significant challenge in a country facing potentially dramatic changes in how people vote, with expected widespread use of mail-in ballots creating openings to cast doubt on the results and even spread false information.
Facebook said Thursday that it is working to help Americans vote by mail, including by notifying users about how to request ballots and whether the date of their state’s election has changed.
The Vote By Mail notification connects Facebook users to information about how to request a ballot. It is targeted to voters in states where no excuse is needed to vote by mail or where fears of the coronavirus are accepted as a universal excuse.
“Providing that accurate information is one of the best ways to mitigate those kinds of threats,” Gleicher said.
How about the BLM symbol ?.
It’s be attack by the leftist propagandists for the Democrat party, this triangle is used by Antifa themselves so using it to attack Antifa makes sense.
FACT: Trump campaign uses nazi symbol. Who will he blame for this? What disinformation will he spread? Who will believe him?
I have often wondered how an educated and industrious people could adopt such willful blindness and follow a morally bankrupt and evil little Bavarian demagogue to the point of their own destruction, taking along with him tens of millions of lives. Or, how a an equally industrious nation could so fervently believe in the infallibility of their emperor that they would send their young off to die every day, with a sip of sake and a pretty head-band. How can rational people blindly fall in line for a leader like that. It seems so.. so… Un-American.
Alas, I have watched as so many of my ‘Chevrah’ have embraced the very same demagoguery; from a petty man whose adulant followers readily see his flaws, but are happy to support him nonetheless. They say, ‘He is narcissistic, but it’s ok, because his narcissism benefits me’. He pokes fun and lies about his enemies, but, ‘it’s ok, because he has convinced me they are also my enemies.’ He is cruel and heartless to the poor and and impoverished, but that is ‘OK, because he has given me more wealth.’ He has given a label to my enemies, ‘libtards’, ‘Main Stream Media,’ The Left’, etc. Indeed, ‘he has uncovered our enemies at every turn and has taught us that only he can save us from those enemies. I will follow him in every step and every turn. I will attend his rallies, and I will support him. After all, with banners and pageantry and stadiums of 100,000 adoring fans, how can he be wrong; even when I cannot understand his logic, even when his opinions contradict one another? I know that he is bankrupt, I know that he is cruel, I know his policies hurt people, but I can tolerate that because he has convinced me that they are ‘Others’, and my leader can see things that no one else can, and he has made me feel good about myself again after ‘Others’ have robbed me of my pride.
After a lifetime of wondering, I now consider myself fully Educated in the world of 1930’s demagoguery. I cannot say I understand the Holocaust, but certainly understand its prelude.
These are symbols commonly used for representing danger. The first is what you see in a neighborhood with kids or blind people etc, the second is for road construction, the third is just a exclamation mark with hi viz yellow.
@Sadly Uneducated
Hitler came to power in no small part because communists were attempting, and nearly succeeded, in carrying out a bloody revolution in Germany (look up the Freikorps). These were the people who had slaughtered millions in Russia, and they wanted to do the same throughout Europe (ever heard of the Spanish Civil war?).
Many people, including frum Jews support Trump not because they worship the man (and his behavior is admittedly not a role model), but because they are afraid. There are afraid of people who claim to care about “equality” but in fact are motivated by envy and hate. People who want to tear down America brick by brick, monument by monument. People who are shoving the whole anti-white, radical feminist, LGBTQ agenda down America’s collective throat. Believe me, if Trump can’t get this situation under control, there is much worse coming down the pipeline…
SC is correct. One might as well ban the Latin alphabet because that is also what the Nazis used. It is easy to find things like government “yield” signs that look the same. In fact, I found a “Holocaust Memorial Day 27/1” that (except for the label on it) looked exactly like one of those Nazi symbols displayed in Wikipedia (Nazi_concentration_camp_badge)
And it is an emoji – Unicode 6.0 in 2010 under the name “Down-Pointing Red Triangle” and added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015.
Trump hate vs minorities, gays, immigrants, the educated, progressives etc, etc shows his use of nazi symbols is real. Everyone knows it. Why deny it? Would you support hitler?
One thing I can tell you. Joe Biden will rid this Country of Jews as he mounts his trip to the promised land to greet the 2nd coming. Bad times are coming, if he wins.