Facebook removes Trump ads with symbols once used by Nazis

WASHINGTON
(AP) — Facebook has removed campaign ads 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.

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,” Nathaniel Gleicher, the company’s head of security policy, told
lawmakers at a hearing.

The Trump campaign spent more than
$17,000 on the ads for Trump and Pence combined. The ads began running
on Wednesday and received hundreds of thousands of impressions.

In
a statement, Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh said
the inverted red triangle was a symbol commonly 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.

Some experts disputed that the red triangle was commonly used as an antifa symbol.

European
anti-fascist groups initially used the red triangle as a symbol, hoping
to reclaim its meaning after World War II, but it is no longer widely
used by the movement nor by U.S. antifa groups, said Mark Bray, a
Rutgers University historian and author of “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist
Handbook.”

The ADL 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.

Even with the
ads removed, Facebook and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, still face persistent
criticism for not removing or labeling earlier posts by Trump that
spread misinformation about voting by mail and, many said, encouraged
violence against protesters during recent unrest in American cities.

Those
questions arose anew during Thursday’s hearing as Democrats pressed the
executives about what moral obligations they felt they had when it came
to content and about decisions they’ve made to remove, label or leave
up false or incendiary posts.

Facebook, for instance, was asked
why it did not swiftly 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 responded. “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
Russian sowed discord online by playing up divisive social issues.

But
that suggests the threat has simply evolved rather than diminished,
said the executives, who pointed out that media entities linked to
foreign governments were now directly engaging online on American social
issues as a way to influence public opinion. Chinese actors, for
instance, have likened allegations of police brutality in the U.S. to
the criticism China faced for its aggressive treatment of protesters in
Hong Kong.

“That shift from platform manipulation to overt state
assets is something that we’ve observed,” said Nick Pickles, Twitter’s
public policy strategy and development director.

The companies say
they have accelerated efforts to root out fake accounts. Twitter, for
instance, said it had challenged in the first six months of 2019 more
than 97 million accounts that showed signs of platform manipulation, and
Facebook said it had disabled about 1.7 billion fake accounts between
January and March.

Preventing disinformation ahead of the election
is a significant challenge in a country facing potentially dramatic
changes in how people vote, with the expected widespread use of mail-in
ballots creating openings to cast doubt on the results and spread
inaccurate narratives.

Facebook said Thursday that it is working
to provide Americans with accurate information about the vote-by-mail
process, with notifications to users about how to request ballots and
about whether the date of their election has changed. The outreach is
targeted to voters in states where no excuse is needed to vote by mail
or where fears of the coronavirus are accepted as an excuse.

“Providing that accurate information is one of the best ways to mitigate those types of threats,” Gleicher said.

Associated Press writer Amanda Seitz contributed to this report.