Donald Trump ‘Nazi’ ads pulled by Facebook

Facebook removes Trump campaign ads featured an upside-down red triangle, a symbol used by the Nazis for political prisoners.

The Trump campaign ad removed by Facebook. Picture: AFP

Facebook has removed campaign ads by US 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 that the ads violated “our policy against organised hate”.

A Facebook executive who testified at a House of Representatives intelligence committee hearing said the company did 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,” said Nathaniel Gleicher, the company’s head of security policy.

The Trump campaign spent more than $US17,000 on the ads for Mr Trump and Mr Pence combined. The ads began running on Wednesday and received hundreds of thousands of impressions.

Donald Trump speaks in the Oval Office before signing an executive order related to regulating social media in Washington. Picture: AFP

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 the anti-fascist collective. He said the symbol was not in the Anti-Defamation League’s database of symbols of hate. The campaign also argued the symbol was 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 organisational structure. Mr 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 or by US 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 was a historical symbol and the database included 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 Jonathan Greenblatt said.

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

AP