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On Thursday, Facebook took the rare step of pulling down a political ad from President Donald Trump. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has expressed his desire to keep Facebook out of political discussions in the past. However, the social media site pulled the ad over a symbol used by Nazis to mark Jewish prisoners in concentration camps appearing in the image.
In the ad, the Trump campaign urges voters to back them in designating “Antifa” as a terrorist organization. “Antifa” refers to a loose group of leftist anti-fascist protesters. The group has no formal leadership or agreed-upon iconography.
Trump’s campaign calls on supporters to repudiate Antifa as a criminal organization. The ad includes an inverted red triangle on a white background in an attached image. This image was commonly used by Nazis during the course of the Second World War to identify political prisoners. These prisoners were typically Jews held in concentration camps.
Many outlets swiftly condemned the Trump campaign for their use of the symbol. The CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan Greenblatt, blasted the president over the ad. “Using it to attack political opponents is highly offensive,” stated Greenblatt. He continued, stating that it didn’t matter whether the campaign was aware of the symbol’s origins. “@POTUS’ campaign needs to learn its history, as ignorance is no excuse for using Nazi-related symbols.”
Team Trump, the official Trump campaign Facebook page, claims that the symbol is commonly seen among Antifa protesters. However, they offered no evidence to back this claim. Antifa has few agreed-upon symbols. The most common symbol connected to the group is a black flag, symbolizing anarchy. Often, the flag is black and red, the symbol of anarcho-communism.
It seems unlikely that a fringe far-left organization would use Nazi iconography. As their name suggests, the group is antithetical to the tenets of fascism. As such, an understanding of the symbols of fascist regimes of years past would be par to the course for any antifascist activists. What’s more, the Team Trump post includes no mention of the symbol as an Antifa image.
The move is a rare one for Facebook. Critics have noted that the social media site is hesitant to intervene with political ads. Zuckerberg himself is on record stating that he believes it’s not Facebook’s place to fact check political advertisements. However, Facebook’s own digital inventory systems are quite capable of filtering out fascist imagery: the site does so automatically in Germany.
