Facebook Inc – Sparks of controversy has hit the Presidential campaign on June 19, 2020 when Facebook was forced to remove many of President Trump’s campaign ads after it had been discovered that the ads were spreading the infamous “Antifa Triangle”, the inverted red triangle that actually stems from the “Prisoners of Auschwitz” badge.
The symbol alone holds a sensitive meaning to most who recall the horrible tragedy that befell the Jewish prisoners in midst of the Nazi regime, bringing heat to the adminstration’s campaign chose to use it out of context with their pleas to sign a petition against Antifa, singling it out as the major cause for most of the civil unrest with anti-fascist and ant-racists standing up against the Police and the Trump Adminstration.
Facebook stated that they do not allow nor support any hate-group symbols or any symbols that do not give the context for people to discuss about the symbol, adding that it went up against their policies and that no exception to the rule can be accepted.
The page run by President Trump’s campaign team has also brought more criticism as the choice for the red triangle was not justified considering only European Antifa protestors had been known to use it rarely and it had never been seen on American Antifa rallyist stated Mark Bray, author of “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook” as well as a historian in Rutgers University.
Tim Murtagh, a spokesman for the presidential campaign stated that the use of the inverted triangle was simply to point out Antifa by a symbol and their position towards them.
The presidential campaign party questioned Facebook’s actions considering that the symbol was also found among the emojis and should have also been part of the banned symbols on the social network as it was not featured on the Anti-Defamation League’s list of banned symbols.
The ADL responded stating that the symbol database was not a list of purely Nazi connected symbols but of symbols “commonly used by modern extremists and white supremacists in the United States”, said a spokes person from the ADL on the veiled accusation by the Facebook page ad runners for the “Team Trump“ page for President Trump and Vice President Pence Team Trump page.
The CEO of the ADL, Jonathan Greenblatt further added that simply the lack of knowledge of the symbols and their meaning does not justify the fact that the president had tried to attack his opponent using such a sensitive representation of political imprisonment as deeply troubling.
Around 88 different copies of the ad had run so far, amassing 800,000 impressions for engagement and reactions alone, making it a hard sell for the online campaign managers to clean up as they swore to remove all forms of the ads as they come across them.
Facebook had since then had removed the ads from the “Team Trump” page.
