Facebook takes down Trump ads 'for violating our policy against organized hate' | Hacker News Reader

Facebook takes down Trump ads 'for violating our policy against organized hate'

ctvnews.ca

178 pointsthrusong276 comments

"Our policy prohibits using a banned hate group's symbol to identify political prisoners without the context that condemns or discusses the symbol," Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesperson, told CNN Business.

The "banned hate group" here is Nazis. This symbol was used in concentration camps. Don't let the corporate speak whitewash that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camp_badge

Edit: Not sure why I'm being downvoted. I'm merely pointing out that the Facebook spokesperson is clearly identifying the violation "a banned hate group's symbol to identify political prisoners." Since the Facebook spokesperson was being vague, I brought context in case anyone was curious, "What banned hate group?" or "which political prisoners?"

This comment, as well as the other comment in this thread which points out that this was the nazi symbol for political prisoners, are both currently grey due to downvotes.

I would be interested to hear an explanation of why these comments are being downvoted.

Are the downvoters suggesting the information is inaccurate? That this wasn't the nazi symbol for political prisoners?

I downvoted because they complain about downvoting. Initial downvoting happens all the time on every comment imaginable.

But the exact opposite is the case. As usual only the anti-trump posts are visible while the rest is -4'd within seconds. This story is entirely made up. No one even knew that symbol and it was obviously not meant in that constructed sense. And now we take MM as a source, suggesting that they said "heil h....?" This entire story is against the submissions anyways. This is so wrong.

So what sense was the symbol meant in? What’s the alternative, plausible explanation? And no, using a red triangle to mean “antifa” is not plausible given how much more common “flags in a circle” is for the group.

The other icons used in the campaign are very generic. Even my Telegram has such a triangle not too far away from the also used "slow emoji". Another explanation could be that it is used by the antifa. It might not be as prominent as the flags, but it is a first-page hit on an image-search and I have seen that symbol multiple times.

At the very least it is not plausible at all that the trump campaign intentionally and openly uses Nazi iconography to mark them as to be gassed, using an additional 88 (=...) symbol in tandem. That is not plausible. In particular because of the source.

In a day or two this will be officially proven to be a complete lie, but no one will care. And submissions to document this will be ignored like they always are.

>but it is a first-page hit on an image-search

Every single instance of an upside down red triangle on an image search for "antifa symbol" is a screenshot of a post from the Trump campaign. There is no use of the symbol without referring to that campaign post.

I'm getting it on the first page as well, but I think you're missing some chronological logic: at the time they created the ad they couldn't possibly be seeing their own ad as the first results.

> The other icons used in the campaign are very generic.

Like that time he had an image of Hillary Clinton, on a background of money, with a "most corrupt ever" caption written in the middle of a star of David. It's intentional.

I'm confused. Hillary isn't jewish. ...yet his daughter is. ...as is his grandson, and most of his New York friends - and also Jared Kushner.

Frankly, the narrative that he's anti-Semitic is not credible considering his "favorite" daughter converted to Christianity with his support.

> I'm confused. Hillary isn't jewish. ...yet his daughter is. ...as is his grandson, and most of his New York friends - and also Jared Kushner.

You're probably confused because like a normal person you see a contradiction, and you appear to resolve it with the most charitable interpretation. Others may resolve it with the non charitable explanation.

He on the other hand has no problem with the contradiction of using an anti-semitic ad while having Jewish family if the ad resonates with his supporters and serves his interests, which it did.

This is one of his unique abilities: allegiance to nothing but himself, therefore contradictions that arise from loyalty to a principle or person are meaningless.

And you can't be racist if you have a black, asian, &c., partner, right? I grew up in Texas, I know how frequently racists will mark someone as, "one of the good ones."

No like the other icons in that campaign, like I said. Other symbols included stop signs, another red triangle with an exclamation mark etc. It's obvious that they were just generic symbols - all of them similar and benign. They constructed this insane narrative with the triangle, made up some bullshit around it (88 of them) and set the usual machine in motion (MM, ADL, MSM, blue checkmarks). And you all know it.

Some idiot intern posting whatever red icon they could find?

I don't think the concentration camp symbol is very plausible either since no one has seen that symbol since 1945.

Can you point to any white supremacist posts or site that use it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Alamo. particularly the parts about the A/B testing on steroid.

I don't understand the relevance here. A/B testing in political campaign ads is pretty normal.

You're thinking too charitably. HN has its share of actual white supremacists.

Oh please.

The fear mongering that white supremacists are everywhere has got to stop. Disagreement via downvoting does not equate to white supremacy. I wish people would comment more instead of downvoting myself, but I don't agree with your hyperbole.

Hello :-) My interpretation is not that it is that it is everywhere, but rather that it has a depressingly large influence and impact.

oh, come on. Frankly, I think demonizing each other is the real damage being done online and in the media lately.

I'm happy to admit I downvoted the above comment because it's jumping to conclusions and charged with hyperbole.

I think what's more concerning is the decisive language and open calls for conflict I've seen on social media. ...and I think we need to really pause for a moment and remember back, maybe 5-6 years ago to see how we got here...

When Obama was President, the ADL reported that there were, maybe 2000, Nazis and KKK members in the US. Tho THOUSAND. That's it. No one talked about the KKK or Nazis. How did we go from that to people accusing anyone who disagrees with them of being a Nazi?

At first, I was surprised that certain things became more mainstream on Reddit - like the open disdain for the concept of "compromise", the acceptance that their own news sources are biased, and the downward spiral of political posts to simply posting insults - there isn't even an effort to make an argument anymore.

Initially, I chalked it up to the extremist tendency of the two-party system - but I'm starting to think there is something more sinister going on. There are too many new accounts demanding violence. Too many international posters with no skin in the game voting for the worst responses. Too many threads where people refuse to discuss and talk only about punitive, and often violent, actions. This is conveniently exactly what the FBI reported Russian online teams were doing4 years ago. Maybe they're still at it?

I hope you'll join me in not throwing name calling around. Encouraging more intelligent discourse - at least on HN? ...and try to believe me when I say that I honestly believe(d) some idiot intern just posted an upside-down red triangle.

What conclusions does it jump to?

> No one talked about the KKK or Nazis.

You're very much mistaken. You weren't talking about the KKK or Nazis:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/fbi-white-supremacists-i...

I've lurked on HN for over 10 years including making an unsuccessful YC application. It's remarkable how the general quality of arguments is increasingly aligned along parroting political groupthink on all extremes.

However, as a non-white male the most alarming observation is the blatantly xenophobic, anti-immigrant rationalising of white supremacy. Perhaps the most brazen exampel of this was vitriolic anti-immigrant comments following the mass shooting in New Zealand from a particular software developer I happen to know personally in real life on here. He obviously does not know this but I've kept a screenshot of those comments to remind myself about the true nature of people.

Whether the symbol is used by Antifa or not doesn't really matter. What matters is if people in general associate the symbol with antifa. I almost always think of two flags (a red and black flag) when I think of Antifa, or just the regular anarchist flag.

Look here: https://www.google.com/search?q=antifa+logo&tbm=isch&ved=2ah...

The google image search for "Antifa logo" does not show the inverted triangle, except in a post explaining the ad we're all talking about.

Nobody thinks of an inverted triangle when thinking about Antifa. Some people in the antifa movement may have used the symbol, but it's not associated with them enough for an ad calling them out to use it.

Why run an anti-antifa ad and use a symbol that people don't associate with antifa?

This is the clearest explanation as to why the lengthy argument in this thread is pointless. Common sense makes it obvious that this symbol was not chosen purely to represent antifa.

Nobody thinks of a nazi concentration camp symbol to label liberals, social democrats, and any party dissenter (this was not the one used to mark jews) either.

Which is why it was chosen. It's not obvious. It's just a red triangle.

It's not just "not obvious" - it's not used at all. ...and hasn't been since 1945. ...and even then it wasn't known except to the people in a few camps.

...so what's your hypothesis here? That he told them to use a near-nonexistent symbol as a secret message to the, maybe 5 people in the world that remembered that symbol?

Does that sound like a credible theory to you?

...or isn't it more likely that some stupid intern just fucked up?

This. I can't wait until we are rid of Trump, but this honestly just seems like somebody was ignorantly copying and pasting symbols.

Why would a campaign intentionally risk the political fallout of using Nazi imagery when that candidate is already the established favorite for white supremacists? There's enough factual shit to be disgusted about regarding Trump, we don't need to be fabricating conspiracies out of geometric primitives.

I have no opinion about what is the most likely scenario, but:

Using really far-fetched nazi symbols in campaigns seems like a smart move if you want maximum attention and for your opponents to call it out, and then most people going: "?? whats nazi about a triange??".

I learned about the Nazi triangles after seeing a pink triangle on a girl's jacket when I was in middle school decades ago. You've seriously never heard about these Nazi triangles before?

> Why run an anti-antifa ad and use a symbol that people don't associate with antifa?

Because we are in the post-truth era, where the White House claiming this to be an antifa symbol is enough to convince the base that their president isn't literally putting Nazi imagery on his campaign ads.

Edit: Observe how there's no shortage of either true believers, or devil's advocates in this thread, that are ready to argue this point.

I agree. ...at the same time, an upside-down red triangle doesn't mean anything to anybody either.

...so really the logical conclusion here is that the intern that posted it is an idiot.

The notion that there is a secret KKK/Nazi message here is conspiracy theory territory.

Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.

I think this was absolutely the right move because it was so blatant and disgusting.

I do however fear that this was a bait. The campaign posts something so blatant in order to get it taken down to be able to claim victimhood and enrage the base.

Or bait to fuel the potential moves by the DOJ and Barr against Section 230 that's received recent coverage.

I don't see how it would help the DOJ do anything against 47 U.S.C. 230. There's nothing there that stops Facebook from enforcing a code of conduct.

A public website is allowed to be biased without losing any protections under that code. There is no distinction between publisher and platform. Hell, you could be a newspaper website with a comment section, and you'd still be legally protected from liability for what users posted.

I strongly encourage people to actually read the law. Its not difficult to understand.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/230

Yup, and that it would work is because Facebook doesn't actually fight back, they just steadily move back their line in the sand because they're afraid of the backlash.

Playing the victim is Trumps pattern, but I'm not sure it is the end goal. I think they'd be just as happy their hateful ads run too.

Trump has proven that he doesn't need any truthful event to rally around. If it doesn't play out he'll just make it up too.

I think this is just more the randomness of Trump and the folks around him / their shifting influences and etc.

The German party AfD is known for this tactic. They say something outrageous, their post gets deleted or something similar happens, then they play into the victim role and call everyone else "Lügenpresse" (≈ Fake News). Internal documents from a few years ago have described this tactic.

Very interesting related twitter thread: https://twitter.com/ParkerMolloy/status/1273631800636702721

I can't tell if the examples in that twitter roll are validating or invalidating the message.

These political threads are a dumpster fire. And these idiots bought right into it.

And if you check out some of her other tweets on this, such as https://twitter.com/ParkerMolloy/status/1273645070709858305

And the replies: https://twitter.com/originalspin/status/1273650404983631875

88 versions of the ad, and the first sentence of the ad contains 14 words. The numbers 14/88 have considerable significance here, especially when paired with the use of a concentration camp symbol..

I see how that could be the case but once we start delving into numerology we start to sound like conspiracy theorists.

14/88 is hardly a conspiracy theory.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Words

This is why they use it. It's the perfect dog whistle. Google 1488 tattoos to get an idea of just how serious and prevalent it is.

[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics

[2]. https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=1488+tattoos&atb=v209-1&iax...

Sure, but with those tattoos, the 14 & 88 are significant and inescapable. There’s no ambiguity and their presence is not hidden. But once you’re counting the number of words in a tweet, you’re talking about things much more hidden. It doesn’t work well as a dog whistle if the metaphorical dogs can’t hear it, either.

https://imgur.com/Z8AICes

Plenty of ambiguity there. I think you may need to evaluate what your motivation is to need to keep disbelieving that racist dogwhistles can actually be ambiguous, especially considering they are that way by design.

You just linked to a picture of a tattoo of the number 1488... I don’t see any ambiguity. Did you intend to link to a different picture?

A tattoo of just 1488, without any racist symbology, is ambiguous. There is nothing to make it distinctive from any other number.

Help me understand what you think an ambigous tattoo of 1488 should look like?

Well, along the lines of counting the number of words in a tweet, maybe 14 stars? And then chains, where the linked chains look kinda like 8s? Something where the 14 and 88 are present, but not obvious unless you think to look for them.

https://www.dhs.gov/news/2018/02/15/we-must-secure-border-an... is a good example of plausible deniability.

Fourteen word headline, starting with "We must secure..."

Was it intentional? No one will likely ever know.

> On average, out of 88 claims that pass the credible fear screening, fewer than 13 will ultimately result in a grant of asylum.

Why use 88 rather than 100 to illustrate this statistic?

You still didn't answer the question.

Which question didn’t I answer? You asked what an ambiguous tattoo of 1488 might look like, and I offered a possibility.

Yup. It’s a false choice, like convincing someone you’re not paranoid. It’s an interesting trick.

That is an mechanism which insulates even well-documented conspiracies that use numerical symbols as identification banners, which is probably why certain of them do exactly that.

Wow! Even if this is a coincidence, the rest of the evidence presented by the author is pretty sound.

Truly a plot against America. I used to think that calling trump a fascist was overboard but maybe it's getting closer to being applicable...

The 14/88 miners have so many degrees of freedom in how they search for these numbers they are always guaranteed to find them. If the number of banned ads was < 88 we would be hearing about how some subset of similar looking ads had size 88.

It's like numerology at some point, or that movie The Number 23.

Hardly. It's 14 words, not 14 anything else. Furthemore, neo-Nazis have in fact also used these numbers in their esoteric numerology in varying degrees of freedom.

It's 14 words, in the same way that "And if you check out some of her other tweets on this, such as" is 14 words. And where is the proof that there were 88 versions of this ad? The Media Matters article has a link "ran 88 ads" that points to [1], but there are only 3 ads on that page.

This "evidence" is a Rorschach test. People see what they're predisposed to see.

1: https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3878791

If you look at the picture of the 3 ads, each has a number in the top left corner showing how many times it ran, apparently generated by the Dewey Square Adwatch tool set cited in the article. The numbers are 30, 28 and 30, which sum to 88. This could have been better explained in the MM article. It could also be a coincidence, but repeated coincidences eventually qualify as a pattern.

So the ad had run 88 times when Media Matters took the screenshot?

Then if it had continued to run, wouldn't it have run more than 88 times? Or possibly it did run again before Facebook took it down, and actually did run more than 88 times?

Now I'm picturing Media Matters watching the ad counter like teenage boys watching an odometer approach 80085.

It’s not an impressions count.

Of course not. The article doesn't specify what is being counted, but Media Matters was clearly counting something.

And like any counter, it's bound to pass 88 on the way to however many versions/targetings/updates/campaigns/whatever the campaign had planned to run.

You say 'of course not' but then just carry on as if the previous poster had endorsed your theory. I am not an adtech person but I had the distinct impression that the tool cited counted the number of promotional spots purchased for each ad placed. On what basis do you say they were 'clearly counting something' as if it were a dynamic rather than a static process?

On what basis do you say it's a static process? The burden on proof is on those making the allegations.

You're the one alleging that they took the screenshot as it counted up in a dynamic process. I'm asking why you seem so sure about about that, in contrast to alternative possibilities. Seems like you can't answer.

I'm not alleging it. I'm just picturing the possibility.

The truth is neither of us knows, so how can we consider the number 88 evidence?

Because evidence for something doesn't require proof beyond the possibility of conjecturing alternative explanations, and if it did, nothing would be evidence of anything, since any sense data could just be hallucination, and ultimately anything that could be cited as evidence at some point relies on sense data.

You are absolutely alleging it.

So the ad had run 88 times when Media Matters took the screenshot? [...] The article doesn't specify what is being counted, but Media Matters was clearly counting something. And like any counter, it's bound to pass 88 on the way to however many versions/targetings/updates/campaigns/whatever the campaign had planned to run.

I was willing to listen to your argument, but instead of making a case you're just insulting my intelligence.

Then it should be easy to demonstrate using some indisputably innocuous control group. Have at it.

Funny that the first sentence of your comment also contains 14 words. I'm not saying it's also a coincidence in the ad, but trying to do numerology without statistics is pointless. A big pile of examples isn't statistics.

Interesting that someone is now creating inverted red triangle "Antifa" shirts after the ad was run. Someone is definitely trying to control the narrative here. (https://twitter.com/kurtssphincter/status/127364804825054003...)

From thread:

So a big part of right-wing troll culture centers on dogwhistles: something that regular people would see and think, "I don't see what the problem is," but has a less wholesome meaning underneath. For instance, the "OK" hand gesture stuff.

We just got a major textbook example of this with the Trump campaign rally in Tulsa, now scheduled for this Saturday.

Originally it was scheduled for tomorrow, Friday, Juneteenth, in Tulsa, site of the notorious 1921 Black Wall Street Massacre.

Simply vile.

And if the excuse is it was all an honest mistake, even worse. That's the sort of cock-up a grade-school competent campaign team would scrupulously avoid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juneteenth

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre

It was obviously not a mistake. Also: https://www.axios.com/trump-juneteenth-38ee6f09-5741-47ef-9c...

See also: the executive order removing protections for LGBTQ+ people in health care on the anniversary of the Pulse massacre.

Aren't date collisions just the birthday paradox in action?

to be able to claim victimhood and enrage the base

That the most powerful man in the world tries to play victim and that his "base", people who call anyone speaking up just to try to get a fair shake out of life a "snowflake", can buy into it is fascinating. Any group of people that has this little self-awareness does need to be enraged. They are true believers, through and through.

It seems an almost unprecedented level of immature trolling.

I wonder if society will get bored of this at some point.

The shock value of using taboo ideology does wear off.

With Naziism, the shock value seems to have actually strengthened over the decades and years. Do you see any sign of it wearing off? I'd say it won't wear off until it becomes an acceptable ideology. Communist or satanist symbols no longer have as much shock value as they used to, for example.

I'm not talking about any particular ideology not being shocking anymore.

I'm talking about society getting bored with people who rely on shocking and immature pranks.

Yea, it feeds on itself. If people get upset, that prompts more people to use it to shock them. When offended people finally get bored with it (ie they stop finding it offensive), I'm sure it'll die down. But some new thing will be used to wind up the new generation of prudes that replaces them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

Placating the base is pointless, it thinks what it's told.

That's a good point. I think it riles up the base, but serves to try to bring people to their side by nature of: "Look how crazy the left wing big tech companies are they censor red triangles"

You're spot on that the base is already sold and doesn't need to be convinced.

Do note this is exactly Trump's gaslit arguments (vile, digusting, untrue, etc.) for attacking the free media.

- The ad in question: https://imgur.com/NQuGvDo

- Nazi concentration camp symbols explained: https://imgur.com/8xo1Bv2

Associating leftist organizations with this fascist political symbol is almost guaranteed to be intentional.

Edit: Some people seem to be trying to defend this by saying it's similar, though not the same, to a symbol used by a small group in Utrecht, Netherlands. Do you think the president's campaign was really trying to mimic (rather than just use) an unknown Netherlands based symbol on a U.S. based ad campaign? Just a day after a National Security Advisor said the president supported the Chinese Muslim concentration camps?

Or the fact that they ran exactly 88 ads with the symbol?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/88_(number)#In_white_nationali...

Jesus Christ.

Wow. Never knew. This is incredibly bold of the campaign.

Why was this downvoted, is it fake or otherwise misleading? I'm not using Facebook or from the USA so I'm out of the loop on the original and wouldn't be able to tell. I'd like to see the ad in question but this makes me wonder what's up with this (helpful seeming) comment.

This entire comment section was grayed out a few minutes ago :/

The pro-Trump and right-wing contingent on this site tends to be very good with deflection, suppression and damage control.

Yep, on their way to taking over HN in my opinion.

I used to think this about HN, but then I went over to /. after being absent for about 15 years. If you had any questions about the job that mods do here, just spend some time there and you'll appreciate it here more. For example, see their discussion about this topic: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/20/06/18/207204/facebook-tak...

Thank you for the link. I haven't been to Slashdot in years. Notice how high the apologists' user IDs are. Eternal September seems to have hit Slashdot painfully hard. I thought HN was getting bad (e.g., see s_y_n_t_a_x in this thread), but some of the comments in that Slashdot discussion are Stormfront-level material, especially when displaying most of the comments.

And it's not just the comments. Here, topics like this are flagged and removed from the front page. There, stories like this are purposefully added by a team of moderators.

My question as well.

I can only assume the points are so damning that someone is trying to erase it.

>> "Why is this reply being downvoted? It is merely informative."

> "It shows the actual words, which are hard to spin. If we keep what was done vague, we can spin it any way we please."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23347313

It's wrong, there are Antifa groups that use an upside down red triangle:

https://www.facebook.com/antifautrecht/

https://afanl.wordpress.com/2018/01/30/english-3-2-2018-anti...

Seems like Facebook jumped the gun on this and assumed the worst.

-- reply @ GP edit --

> Rather than making the association that this leftist group deserves to have political concentration camp tag?

Yeah I believe your hypothesis is crazy and needs more evidence before jumping to such a wild assumption. That's why you word vomit with events that loosely relate to concentration camps and 88 words to support your already loose conspiracy theory.

Ironic that NOW this symbol will be used against socialists since the WSJ and Facebook just made it mainstream and assumed that connection.

No one would have never thought of this connection if FB wouldn't have flagged it and the WSJ didn't immediately report it. Can you honestly say you had this holocaust knowledge? To assume that on everyone and to go further and assume malicious intent is even more dishonest.

People wanted this to be so true, but you are all conspiracy theorists today.

I'm antifa, and I've never seen this symbol used by antifascists, in the US anyway.

Even if they do, it's likely as a way to subvert the symbol used by the Nazis. To use it to attack antifa is to use it like the Nazis did. It's like how black people can use the n-word, but not white people.

Thank you for your anecdote, but I've posted two examples, one active FB group.

It seems to be mainly a European usage, but it exists.

I don't see how pointing out a symbol a group uses is attacking them.

I also don't think equating yourself and antifa to the struggle of the holocaust and slavery is going to win any minds over.

> You also lost me on your n-word logic.

Quelle surprise.

What a messy situation. In today’s day and age you never know what’s real anymore.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this group was ran by some trump associate in secret to peddle their narrative.

I’m not the conspiracy type but I find with the trump campaign the ordinary gets thrown out of the window. Just crazy allegations after one another.

> I also don't think equating yourself and antifa to the struggle of the holocaust and slavery is going to win any minds over.

Thousands of anti-fascists were badged with the red triangle and subsequently slaughtered in the holocaust, which is precisely why the ad was removed.

1. This is the antifa symbol: https://imgur.com/0S81Ht6

2. The president did not use the symbol you linked.

3. Focusing on the antifa symbol used in the city of Utrecht, Netherlands is the definition of cherry picking.

The president's ad has more in common with the Nazi political symbol than a facebook group from Utrecht, Netherlands, and I'm sure you agree that they were not referencing the latter given it's not even in the U.S.

That is AN Antifa symbol.

I thought a couple weeks ago we were arguing whether Antifa existed or was a splintered group, now they have an official logo?

The fact the logo exists and an Antifa group used an upside-down red triangle gives plausibility to the Trump campaign's reasoning.

Those two examples was just a few minutes of searching, I'm sure there are others.

Maybe we can ask the Antifa group WHY they decided to use that triangle.

Do you really think the president was using a symbol from Utrecht Netherlands in a U.S. based political ad?

I think it's plausible someone on his social media campaign saw banners with an upside-down red triangle.

I love how the goal post is moved to whether or not one existed to mind-reading WHY he might have been targeting people deliberately or why me might have used a niche Antifa logo.

edit ----

I'm sure Antifa groups attack the campaign on the same media platforms they share.

Maybe they saw it in a message or posted on a wall, who knows. The fact is you don't and I don't, why are we trying to mind-read why he might have done the worst case obscure scenario that someone suggested.

The more outlandish claim is that he was trying to demean the Jewish population with a symbol used during the holocaust.

You argue that his campaign couldn't have found this antifa logo, I argue that they weren't thinking about this holocaust symbol.

> I think it's plausible someone on his social media campaign saw banners with an upside-down red triangle.

Where? They Googled "antifa" and picked the 493rd result?

> The more outlandish claim is that he was trying to demean the Jewish population with a symbol used during the holocaust.

The upside down red triangle wasn't used as a symbol for Jews in the camps, it was specifically used for socialists, communists, anarchists and other anti-fascists.

> The more outlandish claim is that he was trying to demean the Jewish population with a symbol used during the holocaust.

That is outlandish. And it also appears to be a strawman that you just summoned because I don't see anybody on this thread making that claim.

Less than 10 km from Utrecht, NL is a town called Amersfoort where there was an SS concentration camp in WW2. As far as I know it was the only such camp outside of the boundaries of the Third Reich.

I've never seen AFA Amsterdam or AFA Nederland use a red triangle with the exception of that one conference, and in that instance the triangle isn't even upside down.

> https://www.facebook.com/antifautrecht/

The coat of arms of the City of Utrecht is a split field of red and white, creating in effect a red triangle. As blazon: (party) per bend argent and gules. Basing a logo of an Utrecht group on that visual identity seems far more likely.

> https://afanl.wordpress.com/2018/01/30/english-3-2-2018-anti....

Bold geometric red forms on a brown background, tilted black text in a sans-serif font – I'm betting 5 € that the anonymous Antifa poster designer is himself a fan of the graphic designer Jan Tschichold and his Neue Typographie.

I've never seen comments get downvoted so quickly on HN. I'd be curious if the admins have seen any interesting patterns lately.

For context Act Up coöpted one of those symbols by upturning it. So it’s not that it hasn’t been used politically before.

The point isn't that it's been referenced politically before.

Act Up intentionally upended the symbol as an act of defiance, the same way you would upend a flag.

The symbol in the president's ad is used as is, with an intentional association with what the symbol means historically.

Judging by how your relevant, informative, and constructive comment has been downvoted, HN has its fair share of white supremacists. I sincerely hope the moderation team takes a look at what's going on here rather than nuking this submission for being 'too political', sweeping this under the rug.

The white supremacist contingent on HN is organized and very active. And for some reason, their organized bad-faith activity isn't being responded to by the moderators. In fact, they can't even distinguish it from "natural" responses, given previous remarks they've made. I wish they made a bit more of an effort to understand the patterns of organized white supremacist action.

If I know one thing about Dan, I know for a fact that he does actively look into stuff like this. I've had my disagreements with his moderation, but him being lazy (or incompetent, as your comment implies) isn't among the criticisms.

This is yet another mistaken comment about moderation with no evidence to back it up.

Their initial statement remains true, regardless of their opinion about moderation response to it. You just have to follow dang's account and see how often he has to point out that nationalistic and race-war content isn't allowed (and, every now and then ban someone dumb enough to go full Nazi.)

Perhaps it's true that this site is particularly whitewashed. But it's also home to some of the most compelling arguments I've seen for why inclusiveness matters, how and why you should support minorities in tech, and so on. "The exact opposite of white supremacist positions."

So if you're going to claim that it's particularly supremacist, you'll also have to claim it's particularly leftist.

It's probably more reasonable to suggest that the site is used by many, many people, each of which has a slightly different perspective. You're also probably remembering the outliers. Doubly so by reading Dan's comments, which are necessarily outliers.

Fair enough, although I don't particularly like the trend around here of needing to establish an equivalence with the left whenever the right is mentioned or criticized, since people criticizing the left rarely seem obliged to return the favor.

How do you know it's organized and very active and even exists, versus there are five to ten pro-Trump people who saw and downvoted an anti-Trump comment?

The symbol is the emoji 🔻

On Windows it looks exactly like the ad.

I know that you want to describe how the symbol looks to others.

But I noticed that some people use this as a tactic, saying "it's an emoji, so it must be ok to use this".

I'm writing to remind that sadly we've seen emojis used in offensive context (e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK_gesture#White_power_symbol ) and this is one more example.

I'm not sure if you're saying something like "it's just being used as an arrow symbol", as some others are, but the White House claims that it is an antifa symbol, which pretty much throws that idea out the window. The argument then is what it was really intended to symbolize, since we already know it was chosen to symbolize something besides a pointer.

I made a similar informative comment and also received a barrage of downvotes.

An upvote for you.

I had the opposite reaction. The ad is saying "Put your name below" and has a big red arrow pointing "down."

Sure, it's possible it's intentional nazi symbolism. Or, y'know, it's a red arrow pointing down.

That looks like an arrow? I must be in a parallel dimension.

Sure. Another commenter pointed out it's literally "emoji 🔻" which, you can see for yourself, is identical to the ad on Windows: https://emojipedia.org/red-triangle-pointed-down/

I don't understand how the existence of a downward red triangle as an emoji serves as evidence that they wanted to use it only as an arrow. All this says to me is that they wanted to use a downward red triangle, which is the entire point.

Edit: Also, we know already that it has a deeper meaning, since the White House has told us that.

I get where you're coming from. But I mean, it's a downward red triangle. I could see myself accidentally using it like this. Googling "red down emoji arrow" gives that red triangle as the first result.

If you used it in a UI as a "volume down" button, no one would bat an eye.

> The ads targeted the far left group Antifa, calling on Trump supporters to back the President's calls to designate the group a terrorist organization.

Context matters.

At some point, there was a whole panic about people using the OK hand symbol and how it was a secret Nazi symbol.. and even ADL had to say to slow down and look at context [^1].

Context matters. Yes, the Nazi's used a red triangle. So does the emoji standard. It's also the symbol for family planning [^2]. It's.. a pretty generic symbol as symbols go. If you're going to make the claim this is a secret Nazi power move... well, you're gonna have to provide the evidence because you're making a spectacular kind of claim.

[^1]: https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/okay-h...

[^2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Triangle_(family_planning)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camp_badge#...

> Red triangle – political prisoners: social democrats,communists and anarchists; rescuers of Jews; trade unionists; and Freemasons.

This really doesn't need a lot of work to tie "social democrats" and "anarchists" to Trump's political enemies.

It’s pretty easy to get a sense that the things these people do - even if they don’t result in any harm - are bad. They kind of set off that moral “bad smell” scent that hints at us that something’s wrong. It seems kind of hard to understand why these things are bad without looking at the consequences, and yet it’s possible to condemn manipulation regardless the outcome.

We call this manipulative behavior treating people as “means”. The manipulator isn’t concerned with what people want, but perceives people as tools to achieve the manipulator’s goals. In the same way that a hammer is simply a means to drive nails, the manipulator sees victims as a tool to achieve goals.

It’s that interaction which allows us to condemn the manipulator.

Or it's possible that they felt this was a weak campaign commercial and were ironically expressing a negative opinion of it by using a 'down' symbol, similar to the red triangle used to show declining market index. Or it's possible they meant to use a different emoji entirely and clicked on this one by mistake.

But it's a fact that the campaign has since put out a statement claiming it was selected for the specific political purpose of identifying Antifa groups and not the other possibilities that spring (or limp) to mind.

from the hacker news guidelines:

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

I found it interesting to know that there are people on HN who would downvote these sort of posts. Kind of disturbing more than interesting, though.

POTUS campaign absolutely knows its history. They intentionally walk right up to the line of outright white supremacy, and go over it to test the boundaries like right now. When the response isn't that strong it emboldens them that they can go further. This is boiling the frog so they can get fascism into the mainstream.

That Facebook policymakers still try to pretend a neutral both-sides-ism exists and that people aren't bad actors (just like reddit with /r/the_donald) makes me think they're either idiots or in league with them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Kaplan

https://www.linkedin.com/in/harbath/

https://twitter.com/kevinroose/status/1272920601477255170

Yes, it's how they move the overton window.

Reddit did eventually clean house, though.

r/the_donald is now a dead subreddit, and has been for quite sometime.

Even though it was quarantined, the mods eventually killed it themselves by restricting who can post.

It's likely they're trying to move the userbase to another subreddit.

From what I've seen, reddit's policy is to quarantine a subreddit and warn the admin to moderate more heavily "or be banned". My guess is they did this to ensure reddit wouldn't ban the subreddit and wipe out its whole history (at least that's what I'd do if faced with such a situation).

Has anybody made any suggestion what else the upside down red triangle could possibly be a reference to? It’s uncomfortable how well it fits his message.

WH response was that it's a symbol used by antifa.

"“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, 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. But it is ironic that it took a Trump ad to force the media to implicitly concede that Antifa is a hate group.”

And as far as people can tell, that image has never existed on the internet before that tweet.

Some antifascists do use symbols. They've never been red triangles.

That's not true:

https://afanl.wordpress.com/2018/01/30/english-3-2-2018-anti...

https://society6.com/product/ancap-flag1525938_wallpaper?sku...

https://www.cafepress.com/+red_triangle_antifascist_antifasc...

https://www.redbubble.com/i/canvas-print/Antifascist-Red-Tri...

https://www.redbubble.com/i/postcard/Antifa-Triangle-by-Joes...

Mind you, I don't condone Trump using the logo as a mechanism to target a group.

Worth noting that as far as I can tell, only the first one is from a group calling itself antifascist, and the triangle is a different orientation.

society6, Redbubble & cafepress are not really primary sources of information here (and the "an" in "ancap" is short for anarchist, not antifascist).

The other link don't even feature an "upside down triangle" design, and is from Utrecht, which has a red triangle in its own flag. There's not really a connection.

Yes, it is true. I only have the time to refute one of these "examples" but:

> https://www.cafepress.com/+red_triangle_antifascist_antifasc...

Nobody actually involved with an Antifa group is selling Antifa-themed cafepress merchandise. The idea is laughable.

"MartStore", the vendor in question, sells a variety of politically themed merchandise, including "thin blue line" and "Trump 2020" designs. https://www.cafepress.com/profile/martstore

The cafepress link (the only one that really looks like a downward red triangle) is 2 days old.

One of the redbubble links is not even indexed yet in my google search and the other is not a red triangle, but a flag in a triangle.

In western europe, this is a communist symbol more than anything, to make people remember that they were the one resisting and were also dying in concentration camps. Some communists anfa groups are indeed using it, but as a small badge.

the first link is referencing this, the second is not triangle but red/black flags, the third one is laughable, don't know about the fourth one and the last one is the anarchist flag.

This shouldn't be downvoted; this is indeed the campaign's claim.

https://twitter.com/TrumpWarRoom/status/1273646748364427264

It's a bullshit claim, but that's not /u/giarc's fault.

https://twitter.com/mmfa/status/1273658985967685633

In your second link it does appear associated with antifa -- or am I missing something?

Where are you seeing a downwards pointing triangle in that second link's screenshot?

Perhaps I am failing to follow a twitter thread properly, but I saw a downward red triangle with "antifa" written over it. I also saw a similar symbol that looked like an emoji.

My question is in earnest to understand the context.

In one of the direct replies: https://mobile.twitter.com/4StarPattonII1/status/12736921167...

So, to be clear:

You think the White House Googled up "antifa logo" or "antifa image" or "antifa icon" and somehow wound up with an emoji that appears to be in use by a handful of Spanish speaking accounts instead of the antifa flag in widespread international use that comes up as virtually every result?

And that the Secretary General of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podemos_(Spanish_political_par..., the second largest party in Spain, is somehow using it to indicate his membership in antifa?

I wouldn't know any of that, I was just answering your question. The banner image on the upper-left Twitter user seems pretty clear though.

I'm surrounded by self-described antifa who cover themselves in anti-fascist symbology. I have never seen this outside a list of symbols Nazis used to label people.

you seem to be missing the fact the claim of usage is coming from 'Trump War Room' and is being refuted by the MMFA account.

Ok, suppose for a minute this is true.

Imagine you're in charge of making campaign ads for the Trump. You google image search "antifa logo" and see a sea of stuff that looks like two flags in a circle. ...but instead you choose some obscure symbol that's not in the first page of results?? I mean that really strains credulity. Like, it's definitely possible, but Occam's razor is working hard against you.

I was just trying to follow the evidence presented to see if it supported the argument made, and I was unsuccessful. I am not saying the argument is false, I am just trying to follow the logical chain and I had a question about it.

Aside: am I the only one who thinks web links to twitter are hard to follow? Even the basics of who is saying what, about what, to whom? Usually I can't even tell what side of the argument someone is on when they are saying something, or whether an image or quote is something they are replying to or using as evidence to support their new claims.

Funny, I had always associated the three arrows pointing at a downward slant with them.

That is the logo of the 'iron front' and is quite popular among Antifa supporters in the US, though not in Europe so much.

I also found the whole 14 words, 88 ads to be somewhat suspicious. I try to be careful about my pattern matching, so when it comes to that I'm open to the idea that it wasn't intentional. But taken together it does seem rather too coincidental.

What’s all this about “upside down” and “inverted” triangles? A triangle is a triangle. It doesn’t have a top and a bottom.

when they say inverted they mean with the single point at the bottom and the double points on top.

They are obviously speaking colloquially, not geometrically.

Google image search for triangle and check the most common orientation for a triangle.

If you saw a stock quote with a red triangle pointing upwards, would you be confused? The orientation is meaningful.

Think about what a triangle would do under gravity.

For the record, the WH response is false -- the red triangle is not a symbol used by antifa.

That is incorrect https://www.facebook.com/antifautrecht/

This is just a random Facebook page.

Further, it's just a random FB page with only a couple hundred followers. The actual antifa symbol is completely different.

It’s also their colors and groups sometimes coöpt imagery of their adversaries, so it’s not unprecedented for a repressed group to take a symbol back for themselves (not saying antifa is repressed, but they act on behalf of other groups).

Fascists were not exactly fans of anti-fascists, so while I'd definitely agree that Antifa isn't currently repressed, this has not always been the case.

It's wrong to generalize from one page linked to a specific city in the Netherlands; during WW2 there was a small concentration camp at Amersfoort, a suburb of Utrecht about 10km from the city center. That likely resonated with contemporary anti-fascists in Utrecht, but the red triangle is absolutely not in general use as an Antifa symbol.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amersfoort_concentration_camp

[edit: On second thought I'll not walk into this minefield of a thread quite this nonchalantly with an "actually".]

The symbol does exist in a certain context of Antifa/ARA imagery, but if you use it in full context it just makes the Trump team look even worse, surprised the media hasn't picked up on this angle yet.

I find it hard to believe that an anti-fascist movement would happen to use a symbol used by the most well known fascist movement in living memory.

Perhaps this is like the tactics applied by Boris Johnson to distract search results. Now antifa is going to be all over the news for being an alleged terrorist group regardless of its validity.

have you never seen the Antifa flag and what it's modeled after?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifaschistische_Aktion

AFA is a specific organization which historically co-opted the original generic anti-fascist movement.

While there might be a 'core' AFA organization, the whole point is that they mostly rely on the more generic anti-fascist 'movement' in practice.

Even now, I'd say the majority of the 'members' of this movement, as in the people that show up, are all sorts of people, generally left-wing but including what in the US would be called 'liberals'. Most of these are not explicitly members of AFA.

So I'd say 'co-opted' sort of doesn't fully cover the situation. But I'd also say you're not entirely wrong either.

No, there's no "core" or "whole point" about it. This betrays an ignorance as to what actually happened. [1][2]. AFA is a communist (KDP) co-option of a generic anti-fascism. This is basic history at this point, please see the referenced links. AFA co-opting anti-fascisism covers "the situation" (i.e. history) perfectly well, being that that is what happened.

[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifaschistische_Aktion

[2]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-fascism

> Now antifa is going to be all over the news for being an alleged terrorist group regardless of its validity

But they obviously are a violent anarchist group causing violence, riots, mayhem (and terror?) for their political opponents, regardless of logo used.

This part isn’t news. This probably the most widely known fact known about ANTIFA worldwide, and has been for years. It’s literally their raison d'être.

Clearly they operate unlawfully. If they are a “terrorist” organisation though, that’s another debate.

Either way, if ANTIFA is your friend or ally, I would consider that a PR problem you’ll need to address sooner rather than later.

ANTIFA is not cool.

It means what everyone thinks it does. The first sentence is 14 words [1] and 88 ads [2] were run, notorious neo-Nazi numerology.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Words

[2] https://twitter.com/mmfa/status/1273644108561686530?s=20

Do you really think their marketing team does everything in groups of 14s and 88s to keep up with neo-Nazi numerology?

I think certain influential members of the administration, such as Stephen Miller, are absolutely familiar with them even if Trump himself isn't.

And this isn't even particularly obscure knowledge, it's something that a large number of mass murderers in recent years have made an extensive use of in their messaging: https://twitter.com/originalspin/status/1273653992514412544

And this is exactly how this tactic works. The campaign can send dog whistles that neo-Nazis the world over will immediately recognize and appreciate, and useful idiots can come along and argue that all these blatantly obvious things are just coincidences.

Yes of course they do and comments like yours are exacltly why there continues to be an incentive to use dogwhistles like this. It's an inexhaustable source of plausible deniablity with a clear channel for singaling.

Not "everything". That's a convenient exaggeration that makes the claim seem silly. But of course they demonstrably do engage in this practice.

"Demonstrably"? Demonstrate it, then, by all means.

Right here [0] Homeland Security uses a 14-word headline that even shares the "We must secure" phrasing with the Nazi version of the fourteen words.

[0] https://www.dhs.gov/news/2018/02/15/we-must-secure-border-an...

https://www.dhs.gov/news/2018/02/15/we-must-secure-border-an...

And your second sentence is 14 words.

So people can produce that by accident, even when they're aware of the significance of 14 words. Condemning someone for a sentence with 14 words in it is likely to produce a huge number of false positives.

Reminds me of this comparison from my childhood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln%E2%80%93Kennedy_coinci...

"Each assassin's name is composed of fifteen letters.[5]"

and my favorite: Booth ran from the theater and was caught in a warehouse; Oswald ran from a warehouse and was caught in a theater.[5]

I'm not a multibillion dollar plaform with access to several PR firms hand-crafting social media posts using OG Nazi imagery for the same purpose that Nazis used them for to target to millions in a bid for the most powerful office on earth. Don't judge me by th same standards.

What is your standard for Trump? Can he or his campaign never, ever use a sentence with 14 words, or it's proof that he's dogwhistling?

Can his campaign never use a sentence with 14 words in a campaign ad?

Can they never use 14 words in the first sentence?

Where are your lines where you decide he's guilty, and why are they there? Or have you already decided that, and you're just hunting for additional confirmation?

You're one of my favorite commenters here, and I find myself agreeing most of the time. But in this instance I really do think you're wrong. Here's why:

1. the context is specifically vilifying a loose collective of anti-fascists using a symbol that was used by nazis to mark (among others) anti-fascists. 2. the source is a president who definitely exhibits fascist tendencies, and is very popular with white supremacists. 3. there's a history of weird borderline dog-whistling (see the Twitter thread linked to elsewhere. I think it makes a pretty good case.). 4. if the 'removed 88 ads' is correct, surely that's a very weird coincidence?

I'd say that if the 88 thing is false, I might believe the 14 words thing is a coincidence. But that doesn't change the fact that the red triangle or even the weird focus on antifa as being a terrorist organization is deeply worrying to me.

I am generally skeptical of conspiracy theories, but this one really does strike me as too coincidental to actually be a coincidence.

That said, I also wouldn't be surprised if it's more of a 'trolling' thing than Trump going 'mask off' or whatnot. I'm only arguing that I don't think it's a coincidence.

EDIT: I'll add that considering the popularity of Trump among white supremacists and trolls, it's quite possible that someone somewhere in the organization got to make an ad and decided to fill it up with incindiary dog-whistles. That scenario still makes me uncomfortable, as I really don't want 4chan anywhere near the most powerful country in the world, but it would make the whole thing less of a conspiracy theory. I truly believe Trump is too dumb to have any kind of consistent ideology, so it's possible.

First: Thanks! I'm rather astonished to be on anyone's list of favorite commenters.

I've been discounting the 88 thing. Would it have been 88 ads if Facebook hadn't stopped the ad campaign at exactly that time? Even if 88 ads was the full campaign, that seems to me to be a fairly difficult number for a random right-winger to be able to determine, and therefore like a poor channel to try to send a dogwhistle through. (It's hard for right-wingers to simultaneously be too stupid to understand why their position is wrong, and so clever that they can find all these insanely clever side-channels through which to send dogwhistles - though I guess the actual Nazis did pretty well at being technologically literate barbarians.) To me, it just feels like seeing morse code in the campfire smoke - that is, seeing a deliberate pattern in randomness.

I'll admit that the 14 words at the start of the DHS "We must secure the border" statement seem a lot more real to me - not just the word count, but it's also echoing the start of the actual words.

I'd be more likely to buy the "trolling" idea - that the attempt is to put the most innocent-looking-to-most-people thing possible out there to trigger the reaction, to make those reacting look like hysterical nutcases - except I'm not sure that Trump is smart enough or skilled enough to pull it off this well.

TL;DR: It feels too flimy to me to be a deliberate dogwhistle, but I'm not totally certain of that.

Hasn't antifa been using this symbol for themselves though? I've seen it in some pro-antifa messaging.

I'd be curious if you could link to something that shows that usage. I've never seen this symbol associated with antifa anywhere.

My other comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23566570

Its more a communist union thing than an antifa thing. JL Melanchon, radical left in France, is wearing a small pin red triangle. Not that often used in antifa movement, its more an union thing.

Another commenter, downvoted for some reason, gave an explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23566279

https://twitter.com/carterforva/status/1273581888498786310

> Nothing to see here, just the President running paid ads about his plan to designate his political opposition as terrorists so he can arrest them, using the same exact symbol the Nazis forced their political prisoners to wear.

> For reference, this is the inverted red triangle that political prisoners were forced to wear at the Dachau concentration camp.

https://twitter.com/carterforva/status/1273583187990646784

> Dachau was advertized in the newspaper as a detention facility specifically for radical leftists. Which is the exact group the Trump ad references.

His message of what exactly? Criminal justice reform? How is trump's message remotely related to nazism?

Chineese Concentration camps maybe? I'm distancing myself from US news but sometime its just everywhere.

How antifacist became a dirty word in the minds of many Americans is baffling to me. Also, the fact that people are taking the antifa stuff seriously and Republicans are just parroting Trump on the matter is ridiculous.

I just skimmed through all the articles here: https://www.foxnews.com/category/us/crime/antifa and the only one that is even specific about an alleged instance of organized violence is an incident in Texas[1][2] and is decidedly bereft of actual evidence.

It's pretty clear that people are looking to blame the "other side" for any and all violence.

[1] https://www.foxnews.com/us/texas-investigating-links-between...

[2] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/Anti...

> How antifacist became a dirty word in the minds of many Americans is baffling to me. Also, the fact that people are taking the antifa stuff seriously and Republicans are just parroting Trump on the matter is ridiculous.

There seems to be a history of Antifa inciting violence in recent years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antifa_(United_States)#Notable...

Facebook is in a difficult spot right now. They’re in a damned if you do damned if you don’t situation.

Granted, Zuckerberg and his team in many ways got themselves into this situation, but at this point it’s hard to see how Facebook moves forward without regulators, either on the left or the right, calling for antitrust or privacy laws to be enforced against them.

I’m not sure if you could break up Facebook in the same way that Standard Oil was, but there is certainly appetite for regulatory action against FB on the left and the right.

> They’re in a damned if you do damned if you don’t situation.

No, leaving up Nazi propaganda in place is not that kind of situation. There is only one right answer. Delete the offending content and call out the posters of the content for what they are: posters of racist and hateful content.

Any other action from Facebook is unacceptable. It's not a "damned if you do damned if you don’t". Caving to racists and hate groups to run their awful messages isn't something that you need to seriously consider doing. It's just a ..... No.

I’m sorry I think you misinterpreted what I meant by “damned if you do...”.

I meant that either the democrats or the republicans will damn them no matter what they do.

I agree with your negative sentiments regarding the disturbing advertisements coming from Trump.

I also agree that these ads should not be allowed on any media platform. I was simply commenting on Facebook’s precarious political position.

Despite how much we all dislike Trump on HN, he is the president and he will almost certainly retaliate against censorship from FB.

> Facebook is in a difficult spot right now.

Nonsense. Banning all political advertising is the most impartial option. They just prefer money to even the vaguest approximation of doing the right thing.

Wouldn't they have to ban all political posts altogether? Otherwise the ad stuff would just move into regular accounts.

I meant “difficult” strategically, not morally, from the perspective of Zuckerberg.

I agree with you that the answer to the moral question is obvious, but clearly Zuckerberg is not considering morality in his decision making.

In fact, he is quite the Machiavellian executive. So my comment was that even in that amoral mindset he’s in a difficult spot.

Of course trying to declare antifa as a terrorist organization is just about as useful as charging all of anonymous with cybercrime. Creating a common enemy out of a nebulous group of people that share a political leaning... come on people this is fascism 101.

It is fascinating to watch. my first reaction was more of a surprise more than anything else. Given this administration track record, I would be willing to explain it by lack of knowledge. Personally, I could not care less what symbols are used and I have a family member I never got to meet as he died in one of the camps.

That said, the more I think about it, the more it seems like a bait. And it seems to have worked.

We all really need to take a step back. The move seems desperate.

> Given this administration track record, I would be willing to explain it by lack of knowledge.

What about the track record of this administration would lead you to be willing to explain it by lack of knowledge? If there's one thing the Trump administration has been extremely knowledgeable about, it's this. Their MO is to be racist through dogwhistles and increasingly bullhorns.

Their track record should lead you to believe strongly that this is all intentional and intended to be racist and hateful.

The Trump administration is one week after the next embroiling itself in unnecessary scandals where they are purveyors of hate speech, racism, and violence against minorities. It is not one week after the next of incompetence or 'lack of knowledge', it is years of building on targeted hate directed towards minorities.

Um. Red triangle is not the most complex logo ever created. It is within a realm of possibility that it happened as, um, quality control is somewhat lax in this administration. I honestly think you are doing your cause disservice by presenting it this way.

edit: removed not ; added a clarification

You are ignoring the context of the situation. The context matters. When a group of people who espouse hate against minorities on a daily basis use identical symbols as other groups in history who also espoused hate on a daily basis towards the same minority groups, it is not a coincidence.

Analyzing every move by Trump or his administration or campaign individually, without context of the surrounding mood of the nation or recent history, will lead you to the wrong conclusions.

There is a lot more subtle hate in the world than most people were expecting to exist. But it's there, and when you see time after time the same sneaky tricks used to spread hate, they no longer look like coincidences at all. The 'simplicity' of the symbol is irrelevant. It is simple by design, to give the racists who use it a 'cover' for their racism ("see it's just a triangle you're crazy for seeing things"). The pattern fits, it's racism and hate directed at minorities.

This is a pattern, and pretending each action in the pattern is unrelated to each other or likely all coincidences, is effectively disinformation.

These racist and hateful remarks and statements are not all just accidents.

Decided to delete my original reponse. It may have been too personal an attack. Sorry for that. I still disagree, but I think I will be stopping here.

Something that's always bothered me about articles like this is that they go into great detail to describe the ad, but don't actually show the ad itself.

It's hard to walk the line of not showing Nazi imagery while also needing to talk about it. For example: the people who made The Man in the High Castle destroyed all the Nazi imagery they made out of concern actual Nazis would get their hands on their high quality Nazi imagery. No one wants to be responsible for helping a movement that should have ended at the Nuremberg trials.

That's intentional, to avoid giving it a yet broader platform.

Is it a coincidence that this comes the day after the justice department declared that they intend to push legislation that will diminish section 230 protection? They're coming for Facebook either way so maybe they don't feel the need to feign total neutrality any longer.

So why the ads. Is it because he's facist? Why rally for hate at all. What's the end game? More violence?

To rally the base and win the election in November. His most rabid and prolifically viral political base lives off of the loaded tweets and ads posted using the platform of the President of the United States. This isn't the first time something like this happened with Trump, nor will it be the last.

Comment section in HN is generally the most valuable part of reading an article for me. I hope those people who put out well thought out comments also bless some of these types of article with their well thought out responses.

As for this article, is the triangle strictly the issue? If the same ad is run with a different symbol, would it be fine? If that is the case, what are the list of symbols that are not to be used in ad campaigns?

As someone else commented, I googled antifa symbol and most of the results seem to be a double flag of some sort. So I am not sure what exactly the motivation is behind a red triangle (I saw the comment about "nazi concentration camp symbols").

Lastly, facebook probably removes ads all the time for all sort of minor reasons. Is there a good reason to believe this was somehow malicious?

Happy to help, but all of these questions have already been answered in this comment section.

> If the same ad is run with a different symbol, would it be fine?

They did run it with other symbols, and those were not taken down. https://twitter.com/ParkerMolloy/status/1273636769704091654

> What are the list of symbols that are not to be used in ad campaigns?

This is like asking for a list of sentences that can't be used. It's obviously impossible. You can't enumerate every bad thing in the world, especially when the whole point of being human is that we can invent brand new things.

It's just not a reasonable thing to ask for. It's like a kid in school getting detention for bullying a classmate and saying "Well this isn't fair, how was I supposed to know? Give me a list of everything I'm not allowed to say!"

> So I am not sure what exactly the motivation is behind a red triangle (I saw the comment about "nazi concentration camp symbols").

Yes, that was it.

> Lastly, facebook probably removes ads all the time for all sort of minor reasons. Is there a good reason to believe this was somehow malicious?

Because they said so.

> A Facebook spokesperson told Media Matters in a statement that “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.”

- https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-let-trump-cam...

> If that is the case, what are the list of symbols that are not to be used in ad campaigns?

It's difficult to fully enumerate this because it's highly contextual. If the text was talking about the stock market, we'd all be assuming the down-red arrow to mean something entirely different.

https://mobile.twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1273704510808965...

Interesting:

- The symbol itself is not in the ADL hate symbol database (checked)

- Jacob S. Eder, a historian of modern Germany at the Barenboim–Said Akademie in Berlin on the Post:

“I think it’s a highly problematic use of a symbol that the Nazis used to identify their political enemies,” he said. “It’s hard to imagine it’s done on purpose, because I’m not sure if the vast majority of Americans know or understand the sign, but it’s very, very careless, to say the least.”

Update: this comment also got upvoted and downvoted like crazy. Whatever is the your ideology war, i think you are doomed.

ADL isn't comprehensive. But there's plenty of historical evidence of this. Come to think of it, that's probably the badge my grandpa wore in Auschwitz.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_concentration_camp_badg...

I guess that's a good first step for facebook. I hope they are going to ramp up those efforts before the election.

If twitter and facebook are able to contains those ads it may be the first sign of Trump not being reelected.

I can only hope to see reddit also take some steps in the nexts months. I really hope they do.

Well I'm not seeing any mention of it here, so let me fill you in on a little secret: this symbol is commonly used in cartography to indicate a confirmed hazard. Anyone with any time in the military or emergency management (and maybe hazmat) should immediately recognize the symbol.

Fact check it yourself: search "NATO landmine symbol". You'll find the symbol in use by the UN and NATO, you'll also find standards that dictate orientation, fill style, and scaling factors.

It has absolutely nothing to do with Nazi concentration camps, and the amount of hyperventilating over secret Nazi symbols is really disturbing. I don't know which is worse, that this may largely be performative outrage, or if it is genuine derangement. Ask yourself: why haven't you been told this already? Why is the media winding people up instead of fact checking? Why is facebook outsourcing this disgusting task to the ADL? Also: I predicted this just yesterday :)

Also impressive is the general incompetence shown by the Trump campaign here - some bozo alt-righter on their social media team probably decided to do this and no one in the chain of command noticed or cared. (Or, I suppose it's possible they assented too..)

Trump managed to go from guaranteed win, to most likely loosing.

And he doesn't seem to care anymore. I don't mean he doesn't care about these symbols, I mean he doesn't seem to care if he wins anymore.

at what point was he "guaranteed [to] win"?

When the Dems picked Biden. (and I say this as a Dem)

The pandemic shook everything up, but prior to that...

Biden has out polled Trump since at least February. At no point was Trump's victory assured. And his defeat is not assured either (donate to the campaign).

> Biden has out polled Trump since at least February.

The same was true for Hillary.

are you saying Trump was guaranteed win in 2016? Or are you saying you don't believe polls are indicative? Both positions are wrong.

Don't fall victim to your bubble; he still has lots of supporters. People thought he had no chance in 2016 too.

> Trump managed to go from guaranteed win, to most likely loosing.

You don't understand the modern American political and cultural climate if you think this will affect him negatively.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTACH1eVIaA

Can it be sabotage? Whoever is in charge of this did it intentionally.

They are a multi billion dollar organization and they've had a social media team that is always on message. In most cases I'd put it down to some staffer making a mistake, but this stuff doesn't just show up without vetting and approval.

They are testing boundaries. Maybe they intentionally went over the line this time in order to see how strong the response would be. But I don't think hanlons razor applies here - they have shown time after time they know what they're doing.

There have been so many such episodes that it seems more realistic to view it as a trial balloon.

You have to be very naive to allow free Streisand effect to Trump.

So they would turn a stupid ad that few would see into something that will get huge audience for free.

Played right into their hands.

> The Anti-Defamation League said Thursday the triangle "is practically identical to that used by the Nazi regime to classify political prisoners in concentration camps."

Wow.

The red triangle was used by the Nazis to identify political prisoners (eg communists), not Jews or blacks or anything "hateful" like that. It's completely normal for countries at war to have political prisoners and even in peacetime too. America still has it's own political prisoners in prison right now for crimes like spying and leaking classified information. Other western countries are even worse, having people locked up for expressing banned political ideas. Ironically, that includes Nazis themselves in Europe, but it's also illegal to display the ISIS flag in the UK, for instance. People obviously love having political prisoners.

You're saying that if a person chooses to use a symbol that Nazis used to identify their political enemies in their prisons, that person can't be expressing anything hateful because other countries also use symbols to categorize prisoners. I almost can't believe that you actually think that.

Yes. Just because the Nazis did it, doesn't make it "hateful" (racist, etc.). People are going off the rails worrying about any kind of symbols or hints related to Nazis because they've somehow become a popular bogeyman.

Strategically, this allows Trump to get his ad taken down by facebook, which has previously not done so. That means he now can claim some kind of conspiracy against him. If the story does not grow big, that's the end of it, and a small win for Trump.

If the story grows, then it will become less about the symbol (which is at least somewhat obscure) and more about antifa. The more the conversation is about antifa, and the less about unnecessary police violence, the better for Trump.

Honestly, I don't think FB should have taken down the ad. I don't see what it really accomplishes. The fact is that Trump has his own audience. The more media companies fight for control, the more they just make a silo of themselves and prevent any real trust or dialogue between voters in opposite parties.

> the red triangle was "a symbol widely used by Antifa."

I am not from US but is this kind of symbols actually used in secret?

I remember prominent democrats( i think maybe even Hilary clinton) and media claiming ok hand and pepe frog were secret symbols of white supremacists.

> ok hand and pepe frog were secret symbols of white supremacists.

They are dog whistles, together with "kekistan" and few other hand gestures.

You can find various pictures of known white supremacists groups prominently showing the gestures.

The red inverted triangle is used in europe by communists and sometime unions to "remember" those who dies in the camps for the liberty. Some trotskist antifa group do wore them but those are not the "black blocs" kind.

For context, here is the symbol used on the Antifa Utrecht homepage on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/antifautrecht/

I'm not sure how anyone can claim it's not related to Antifa.

This is a good explanation:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23566826#23566911

"The Anti-Defamation League said"

This story is entirely made up. They explained and even proved where that symbol came from. MM even claimed that they ran 88 of them - meaning "you know what". Yes that's actually what people are supposed to believe.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com