Facebook took the rare step of disciplining President Donald Trump and his campaign Thursday, as the social media platform officially removed 88 Trump-sponsored advertisements denouncing far-left groups. The social media network specifically took issue with an inverted red triangle used in the ads—a symbol that the Trump camp insisted represents antifa, but is far more commonly recognized as the one used by Nazis to identify political prisoners. “Our policy prohibits using a banned hate group’s symbol to identify political prisoners without the context that condemns or discusses the symbol,” Facebook spokesman Andy Stone told the Washington Post, which first reported news of the symbol’s use in the ads.
The now-banned ads, which were sponsored by Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, and the “Team Trump” campaign page, were part of the Trump team’s broader—and baseless—push to blame anti-fascist groups for violence at the Black Lives Matter protests that have erupted across the country, warning users that “dangerous MOBS of far-left groups are running through our streets and causing absolute mayhem.” (Ads that use the same language but different symbols, including a stop sign and a yield symbol, were not taken down by Facebook.) The Trump campaign has insisted that the red triangle was meant to symbolize antifa, pointing to an unofficial t-shirt design that bears the shape. “The red triangle is a common Antifa symbol used in an ad about Antifa,” Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh told the New York Times. “Pretty straightforward.”
Antifa, however, is more commonly identified through other symbols, such as black and red flags and three arrows. The red triangle, meanwhile, was used by Nazis in concentration camps to identify imprisoned political groups like Communists, Social Democrats, liberals, and other opposition parties in the 1930s. (Jewish political prisoners were designated with a variation on the red triangle symbol.) Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook author Mark Bray told the Times that while some anti-fascists have since reclaimed the red triangle, “the origin of the symbol is universally agreed to be with the Nazis and the concentration camps.” “This is a symbol that represented the extermination of leftists,” Bray, a historian at Rutgers University, told the Times. “It is a death threat against leftists. There’s no way around what that means historically.”
Civil rights groups and Holocaust scholars have widely condemned the symbol’s use in the Trump ads as a result, regardless of what the campaign’s intent was in using it. “It is not difficult for one to criticize their political opponent without using Nazi-era imagery,” Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. “We implore the Trump campaign to take greater caution and familiarize themselves with the historical context before doing so. Ignorance is not an excuse for appropriating hateful symbols.” Holocaust scholar Deborah E. Lipstadt told the Post that the apparent Nazi invocation was especially troubling following the Trump campaign’s original plan to hold the president’s upcoming rally in Tulsa on Juneteenth, a decision that was viewed by many as a racist dog whistle. “It’s an insensitivity, and likely indicative of who’s around the table when these decisions are being made,” Lipstadt said. “I find it shocking.” (While it is unclear whether the number is intentional or just a mere coincidence, the number of Facebook ads bearing the red triangle, 88, also happens to be a white supremacist numerical code.)