The campaign placed 88 ads with an obscure concentration camp symbol on them.
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Another day, another potentially racist dog whistle from our president and his representatives. This time, Facebook — which has been reluctant to take on problematic content from Trump, unlike social media peer Twitter — is taking action and removing it from the platform.
On Wednesday, the Trump campaign placed 88 ads on Facebook — 88 is a number with Nazi connotations — that featured a symbol used by Nazis to denote political prisoners in concentration camps. The Trump campaign denied the reference to any Nazi symbols was intentional and deactivated the ads on Wednesday. (Deactivating the ads meant that they could still be seen on the pages of Trump and others, but Facebook was no longer placing the ads in users’ timelines.) Following tweets and reports about the ads, Facebook removed them on Thursday for violating its policy against “using a banned hate group’s symbol,” the company told Recode.
The symbol in question is an upside-down red triangle, which accompanies text about “dangerous mobs” of “far-left groups” causing mayhem in cities. The ad then asks readers to stand with President Trump against antifa. It ran on pages for Trump, Vice President Pence, and Trump’s official campaign.
Nazis used different colors of upside-down triangles sewn onto clothing to categorize concentration camp prisoners. The pink triangle, used to denote gay people, is perhaps the best known of these, as it was later reclaimed by the LGTBQ community. Red triangles were used for political prisoners, such as people believed to be communists or social democrats. But it’s pretty obscure.
Then again, the use of a red triangle as an antifa symbol, which is what the Trump campaign claimed it was meant to be, is even more obscure.
