Facebook Pulls Trump Ads Citing Organized Hate Violation, Contradicts Zuckerberg
Facebook removed pro-Trump campaign ads for violating the platform's policies. The decision is surprising given Facebook's stance on moderating the content of political campaigns and recent comments from its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.
As Twitter and the Trump administration continue to clash over the platform's decision to finally apply its code of conduct to messages from the president and other political figures, Facebook has taken a strong stance of remaining agnostic in such cases. Last month, Mark Zuckerberg famously stated he doesn't feel that Facebook or social platforms should be "arbiters of truth" and take a role in moderating comments from political leaders. His position – and, by extension, Facebook's response – was to allow political ads more leeway with their language so that people could see a politician's message with transparency. After Twitter removed a Trump tweet with the phrase "When the looting starts, the shooting starts," Zuckerberg responded with a message saying "we should enable as much expression as possible unless it will cause imminent risk of specific harms or dangers spelled out in clear policies". At the same time, right-wing political figures including Trump have continued to accuse social media platforms of demonstrating liberal biases and silencing conservative voices.
In an unexpected turn, Facebook has now taken down a run of advertisements supporting Trump's 2020 election campaign. The explanation given to CNN Business was "We removed these posts and ads for violating our policy against organized hate. Our policy prohibits using a banned hate group's symbol to identify political prisoners without the context that condemns or discusses the symbol." The Trump War Room, the Trump campaign's official Twitter account, claimed that the symbol is a common Antifa logo. By all accounts from Antifa, it is not.
The ads themselves repeat anti-Antifa rhetoric the Trump campaign has echoed since the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests. The message itself is something Facebook and other platforms have allowed without incident, but the "hate group's symbol" referred to in Facebook's statement is the upside-down triangle added to the most recent iteration of the advertisement.
The upside-down triangle is recognizable as the symbol used to indicate political prisoners by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Additionally, Media Matters highlights that of the roughly 2,000 Trump campaign ads that have run since June 3 featuring anti-Antifa language, exactly 88 of them are this version with the triangle symbol. As the debate over the ban spreads on Twitter, users have also pointed out that the opening sentence contains exactly 14 words.
14/88 is a common white supremacist expression. The "14" represents "The 14 Words", a name for the 14-word slogan of a now-defunct white supremacist terrorist organization known as The Order. The "88" is another common Nazi expression. It signifies the letter "H", the 8th letter of the alphabet, to represent "HH" for "Heil Hitler". It's entirely possible that the 14-word introduction appearing on exactly 88 ads which also happen to have the upside-down triangle is an astounding coincidence. Twitter users and Facebook's moderation team don't seem to think so, though. While it's hard to argue against Facebook's decision to remove the ad, these events bring into question why the platform would approve the ads, to begin with.
Sources: CNN Business, Media Matters