Facebook removes Trump campaign ads with ‘ Nazi’ symbol
The move follows 900 far- right ads being removed this week. Trump has accused social media companies of ‘ censorship’. Facebook said on Thursday that it took down posts and ads run by the re- election campaign of US President Donald Trump for violating its policy against organised hate as part of a broader culling of what the social media giant considers inflammatory racial rhetoric. The ads showed a red inverted triangle with text asking Facebook users to sign a petition against Antifa, a loosely organised anti- fascist movement. In a tweet on Thursday, the Anti- Defamation League’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, said: “The Nazis used red triangles to identify their political victims in concentration camps. Using it to attack political opponents is highly offensive.” The Facebook ads were run on pages belonging to Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, and also appeared in ads and organic posts on the “Team Trump” page. ” Our policy prohibits using a banned hate group’s symbol to identify political prisoners without the context that condemns or discusses the symbol,” said a Facebook company spokesperson. “The inverted red triangle is a symbol used by Antifa, so it was included in an ad about Antifa,” Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said in an email.
“We would note that Facebook still has an inverted red triangle emoji in use, which looks exactly the same, so it’s curious that they would target only this ad. The image is also not included in the Anti- Defamation League’s database of symbols of hate.” Trump has threatened to designate Antifa a domestic “terror” organisation, though scholars are not sure it is possible for him to do so. Antifa members have denied accusations of “terror”. The Twitter page of Antifa International - a branch of the loosely organised movement - noted that Antifa does not use that symbol and had pointed out the use of the symbol in Trump- linked ads more than a year ago. Facebook removed another 900 social media accounts Tuesday linked to white supremacy groups after members discussed plans to bring weapons to protests about police killings of Black people.
The accounts on Facebook and Instagram were tied to the Proud Boys and the American Guard, two hate groups already banned on those platforms. Source: aljazeera. com