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Comment by bduerst | Hacker News Reader

- 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...

View on HN

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 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.

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.

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

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.

Jesus Christ.

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?

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

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

An upvote for you.

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