Facebook said on Thursday that it took down posts and ads run by the re-election campaign of US President Donald Trump for violating its policy against organised hate as part of a broader culling of what the social media giant considers inflammatory racial rhetoric.
The ads showed a red inverted triangle with text asking Facebook users to sign a petition against Antifa, a loosely organised anti-fascist movement.
In a tweet on Thursday, the Anti-Defamation League’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, said: “The Nazis used red triangles to identify their political victims in concentration camps. Using it to attack political opponents is highly offensive.”
The Facebook ads were run on pages belonging to Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, and also appeared in ads and organic posts on the “Team Trump” page.
“Our policy prohibits using a banned hate group’s symbol to identify political prisoners without the context that condemns or discusses the symbol,” said a Facebook company spokesperson.
“The inverted red triangle is a symbol used by Antifa, so it was included in an ad about Antifa,” Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said in an email.
“We would note that Facebook still has an inverted red triangle emoji in use, which looks exactly the same, so it’s curious that they would target only this ad. The image is also not included in the Anti-Defamation League’s database of symbols of hate.”
Trump has threatened to designate Antifa a domestic “terror” organisation, though scholars are not sure it is possible for him to do so.
Antifa members have denied accusations of “terror”.
The Twitter page of Antifa International – a branch of the loosely organised movement – noted that Antifa does not use that symbol and had pointed out the use of the symbol in Trump-linked ads more than a year ago.
Facebook removed another 900 social media accounts Tuesday linked to white supremacy groups after members discussed plans to bring weapons to protests about police killings of Black people.
The accounts on Facebook and Instagram were tied to the Proud Boys and the American Guard, two hate groups already banned on those platforms.
The Proud Boys were initially considered members of the alt-right, a re-branding of white nationalist ideology that gained popularity around the time of Trump’s election in 2016. They supported Trump initially, along with other similar groups.
Foreign interference
Social media companies have also been accused of allowing their platforms to be employed by foreign actors to push division in the US.
Leaders from Facebook and Twitter told the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee on Thursday that they had not seen evidence of coordinated foreign interference in conversations about absentee voting or about recent protests on anti-racism and policing.
However, Twitter’s director of global public policy strategy and development Nick Pickles said the company had seen a shift from platform manipulation to public tweets from state media and government accounts.
Democratic Representative Jim Himes pressed Facebook’s head of security policy Nathaniel Gleicher on what the company was doing to deal with the concern that its algorithm promotes polarisation.
Gleicher said Facebook’s users did not want to see divisive content and the platform had refocused to emphasise content from friends and family.
The debate over content moderation has intensified in recent weeks. Twitter and Facebook have diverged on how to handle inflammatory posts by President Donald Trump, which Facebook’s Gleicher was pressed on at the hearing.
Trump, in turn, has accused social media companies of censorship and called for the government to roll back liability protections for tech platforms.
Asked about changes to this law, known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, Gleicher said the company would comply with the law if Congress made changes, but that the shield it creates is essential for Facebook to do its work.
Richard Salgado, director for law enforcement and information security at Alphabet Inc’s Google, faced accusations that the company’s lack of transparency had allowed it to avoid the heat other tech firms had drawn.
Salgado said Google provides transparency reports about advertising on the platform.
SOURCE: AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGENCIES
