Facebook removes Trump ad over a controversial symbol

Facebook has removed ads for US President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign as they involved a symbol used in Nazi Germany.

Facebook said that an inverted red triangle similar to that used by Nazis was found in the ad. That symbol is used by Nazis to label opponents such as communists.

However, Trump’s campaign team claimed that they used the sign to show far-left activist group Antifa, which uses the symbol.

The social media giant said that ads violated the policy against organized hate. 

Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s head of security policy, said on Thursday, “We don’t allow symbols that represent hateful organizations or hateful ideologies unless they are put up with context or condemnation,”

 “That’s what we saw in this case with this ad, and anywhere that that symbol is used we would take the same actions.”

The ads were posted on the site of pages that belonged to Trump and Vice-President Mike Pence. These pages were online and got thousands of views.

A spokesman for the Trump campaign Tim Murtaugh stated, “The inverted red triangle is a symbol used by Antifa, so it was included in an ad about antifa,”

“We would note that Facebook still has an inverted red triangle emoji in use, which looks exactly the same,”