Symbols.
I saw this tweet last night and glossed over it on the assumption that it couldn’t be as bad as it looked and there must be some important context that was missing that would explain it.
???? Confirmed: Team Trump on Facebook posted for Trump supporters to stand against Antifa – and added a giant upside down red triangle. Just google that « upside down red triangle » and see what comes up first. pic.twitter.com/wAJLwcUMFd
Laura Walker ⚖???????????? ???????????????????????????? (@LauraWalkerKC) June 18, 2020
There was context, it turns out. But not enough to stop Facebook from nuking it.
Facebook removed 88 ads Thursday posted by the accounts of President Donald Trump, the Trump campaign and Vice President Mike Pence that the social media giant said were “violating our policy against organized hate.”
All of the identical ads featured an upside-down red triangle, a symbol used by the Nazi party in World War II to identify political dissidents in concentration camps. The ads caught the attention of some Twitter users Thursday who pointed out the symbol’s historical significance…
“Our policy prohibits using a banned hate group’s symbol to identify political prisoners without the context that condemns or discusses the symbol,” [a Facebook] spokesperson wrote.
I have no difficulty believing that Trump had nothing to do with this and that he wouldn’t have recognized the red triangle even if he’d seen the ads before they went up. By his own admission, he didn’t know what Juneteenth was until a few days ago when a black Secret Service agent told him. The odds of him being able to identify lesser-known Nazi concentration camp badges for prisoners are slim to none.
Whether the staffer behind the ads was able to identify them is a separate question.
The President of the United States is campaigning for reelection using a Nazi concentration camp symbol.
