After breaching its policies regarding organized hate, social media giant Facebook announced that it took down United States President Donald Trump's campaign ads, Thursday. This was after Trump's camp attacked its so-called "Dangerous MOBS of far-left groups," by featuring a red inverted triangle.
According to CNN, the said triangle was nostalgic of the symbol that was used in classifying political prisoners inside Nazi concentration camps as described by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).
Moreover, Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone said that the ads and posts were taken down since it violated the platform's policy on posting organized hate. He added that their policy strictly prohibits using symbols of banned hate groups in posts that do not have the context of condemning or discussing its symbolism.
Facebook also confirmed that the hate group that they were referring to is the Nazis since the same symbol was used during their regime.
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Far-left groups targeted by ads.
It was very apparent that the ads particularly targeted Antifa (Anti Fascists), a far-left group which earlier this year was threatened by Trump to be labeled as a terrorist organization. The ads were encouraging supporters of the president to support the said identification of the group.
Meanwhile, Trump's camp also responded to the criticisms and said that the red triangle did not pertain to the Nazis but has been widely used by Antifa in their campaigns as well. They also gave several links and websites which sold merchandise containing the symbol. However, they were not able to provide any examples of instances wherein Antifa was actually wearing the said symbol.
In addition, the ADL also recognized that the symbol has been used by some Antifa activists, however, they stressed that it wasn't very common.
BBC also reported that based on the political ad library of Facebook, the said ads which contained the offensive symbolism were initially posted on Wednesday on the Facebook page "Team Trump", the official page of Vice-President Mike Pence and the main page of President Trump.
The said the political ad was seen by almost one million users through the page of Trump based on the data released by Facebook.
On top of this, The Guardian reported that Trump's communications director for campaign, Tim
Murtaugh insisted that they were not pertaining to the Nazis but solely yo Antifa. He also noted that Facebook has an inverted triangle emoji which is exactly the same as what was used in the ad, thus it made them wonder why the ad was being singled out.
He also added that the said image was not listed in the ADL's database which contains hate symbols. To this, the ADL responded and said that their database is not used to store Nazi symbols but symbols that are mostly used by modern-day extremists in the US.
It can be recalled that Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook has been previously criticized for not acting on a post by Trump's camp which said that "looting" leads to "shooting," in the middle of the protests that erupted in the country due to racism and inequality.
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