The symbol appeared in paid positions sponsored by Donald Trump and the U.S. Vice President. (File)
On Thursday, Facebook deactivated dozens of advertisements placed by US President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign, which included a symbol formerly used by the Nazis to designate political prisoners in concentration camps.
The marking appeared as part of the online salvo of the campaign against antifa and “far left groups”.
A red inverted triangle was first used in the 1930s to identify communists, and was also applied to social democrats, liberals, masons and other members of opposition parties. The badge imposed on Jewish political prisoners, on the other hand, included a yellow triangle covered with a red triangle.
The symbol appeared in paid publications sponsored by Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, as well as on the “Team Trump” campaign page. It was presented alongside a textual warning on “Dangerous MOBS” and asking users to sign a petition on Antifa, a loose collection of anti-fascist activists that the Trump administration has sought to link to recent violence, despite records arrests that show their involvement is trivial.
Facebook deleted the material following requests from the Washington Post, claiming that advertisements and organic publications with the inverted triangle violated its policy against organized hatred.
“Our policy prohibits using the symbol of a prohibited hate group to identify political prisoners without the context that condemns or discusses the symbol,” said Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesperson.
But the ads on the president’s single page – which began running Wednesday – gained up to 950,000 impressions Thursday morning. Identical ads on the Pence page have had up to 500,000 impressions.
A total of 88 ads with the inverted red triangle were shown – on the pages of Trump, Pence and the official “Team Trump” page of the social network. They targeted the 50 states.
Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook security policy chief, was confronted with questions about announcements by representative Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., During a Thursday hearing before the House Intelligence Committee.
“We obviously want to be careful about allowing someone to affix a symbol to condemn or discuss it,” Gleicher told lawmakers. “But in a situation where we don’t see any of these items, we don’t allow it on the platform and we will remove it. This is what we saw in this case with this ad, and wherever this symbol is used, we would take the same action. “
Tim Murtaugh, a Trump campaign spokesperson, said, “The red triangle is an antifa symbol,” pointing to examples of the iPhone cases and water bottles marked with the badge. A more common emblem for the anti-fascist movement includes two flags, one red and one black, surrounded by a circle.
“We would like to note that Facebook still uses an inverted red triangle emoji, which looks exactly the same, so it is curious that they are only targeting this ad,” added Murtaugh.
Although some symbols displayed by the Nazis were recovered, including the pink triangle used in concentration camps to label gay detainees, the red triangle was not redesigned in the same way, said Jacob Eder, historian of Modern Germany at the Barenboim – Said Akademie in Berlin.
“I think it is a very problematic use of a symbol used by the Nazis to identify their political enemies,” he said. “It’s hard to imagine that it was done on purpose, because I don’t know if the vast majority of Americans know or understand the sign, but it’s very, very reckless, to say the least.”
Thursday’s Facebook action was not the first time the tech giant has taken action against Trump campaign ads. In March, the company removed ads that it believed included misleading references to the U.S. Census – following an outcry from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., Among others, about the platform’s initial decision to authorize publications.
In general, however, the company took a slight hit, vowing not to control the veracity of politicians’ positions. The stance sparked tumultuous internal debates on Facebook, and it also singled out the Twitter company, which last month applied a label verifying the facts to the president’s misleading tweets regarding postal ballots. Twitter has also taken the unprecedented step of limiting the scope of a presidential tweet predicting, amid protests over the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, that looting could lead to “gunfire”.
The actions taken by Twitter – which outright banned political ads – drew reprimand from Trump, who a few days later signed an executive order that could open the door for the U.S. government to take more responsibility for monitoring the speech. line.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in a long article this month defending his management of the president’s use of his platform, said he was concerned about an approach “leading us to edit on content we don’t like, even if it doesn’t violate our policies. ” “
Facebook’s initial impression of the symbol was that it did not violate company rules. User who flagged one of Trump’s pages to display the symbol received a response Thursday morning that the imagery “does not violate any of our specific community standards,” according to correspondence reviewed. by The Post.
In internal Facebook communications, a politician said Thursday morning that deliberations are underway but that the red triangle is “common enough to be an emoji on most keyboards, including Facebook” and that the ” triangle without more context clearly does not violate the letter “of policies prohibiting symbols of hateful organizations.
Others have taken a different view. An employee writing on the company’s internal discussion platform, called Workplace, described Facebook’s rating system as “fundamentally broken,” according to documents seen by The Post.
Facebook has long banned hate speech and symbolism on its platform, but the company has sometimes faced a backlash for being too permissive. In 2018, Zuckerberg defended the rights of Holocaust deniers, saying he did not believe “that they were intentionally wrong”.
In this case, Facebook’s decision against Trump’s ads came after a concerted push, including by the Law Committee of Lawyers for Civil Rights. David Brody, the organization’s lawyer and senior fellow for privacy and technology, reported the material to Facebook, as well as its civil rights listeners.
Deborah Lipstadt, a leading American Holocaust specialist, said the inclusion of the symbol in alarmist advertising echoed the campaign’s initial decision to organize a rally in Tulsa, Okla., June 19, known as the name of Juneteenth in commemoration of the end of slavery. Trump delayed the rally a day after an outcry.
“It is an insensitivity, and probably an indication of who is around the table when these decisions are made,” she said. “I find it shocking.”
Trump campaign spokesperson Murtaugh noted that the tagging was not included in the Anti-Defamation League’s hate symbol database. But ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt condemned its use in political combat as “offensive and deeply disturbing”.
“It is not difficult for someone to criticize their political opponent without using images from the Nazi era,” Greenblatt said in a statement. “We implore the Trump campaign to take more precaution and to become familiar with the historical context before doing so. Ignorance is no excuse for appropriating hateful symbols.”
Jake Hyman, an ADL spokesperson, said that the markup is not in the organization’s hateful database because the inventory is not for “historic Nazi symbols” but rather for “symbols commonly used by modern extremists and white supremacists in the United States”.
ADL and other major civil rights organizations, including NAACP and Color of Change, launched a new campaign this week urging big brands to withdraw advertising funds from Facebook, saying the company has not prevented hate speech and incitement to violence.
Facebook maintains that it has made progress in eliminating disinformation and hateful content, and this week announced a new initiative that aims to help 4 million people register to vote this year. In a “USA Today” column describing the effort, Zuckerberg also said the company would deploy a feature allowing users to opt out of seeing political ads in their feeds.
Other variations of the announcement that sparked a flashback on Thursday used a performance sign, which has the same shape and a similar color scheme, but is particularly distinctive with only a red outline and a white interior. Some documents also included a stop sign.
Trump made antifa – a label associated with anti-fascist protesters who sadly quarreled with far-right figures after his election in 2016 – a central part of his response to recent protests following the murder of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis. The effort to rally supporters using the specter of a horde of marauders resembles the emphasis it has placed on the threat of a caravan of migrants heading for the U.S. border in the run-up to the mid – mandate in 2018.
So far, however, the alleged threat has been mostly non-existent – a central online alarm point that is not reflected in scenes of peaceful protests nationwide. Despite warnings of antifa raids in many cities, there is no evidence linking the outbursts of violence to an organized leftist effort.
During the 2016 campaign, Trump tweeted and then deleted a graphic showing Hillary Clinton alongside $ 100 bills and a six-pointed Star of David – the type of star the Nazis forced the Jews to wear on their clothes. The candidate at the time insisted in a statement that the badge was not anti-Semitic because it represented the badge of a sheriff, not the stigmatized Star of David.
