Facebook on Thursday removed adverts placed by the US President Donald Trump' re-election team that has similarity with symbols used by the hate groups of Nazis against political prisoners in concentration camps.
Facebook in its statement said that the adverts violated the company's policy against organised hate.
Ad violated the company's policy
"We don't allow symbols that represent hateful organisations or hateful ideologies unless they are put up with context or condemnation," the social network's head of security policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, said before the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday.
He continued, "That's what we saw in this case with this ad, and anywhere that that symbol is used we would take the same actions," BBC reported.
Around 88 odd ads were released by the "Team Trump" in the wake of his reelection campaign on Wednesday. The ads contained a sign of an inverted red triangle along with text warning of "Dangerous MOBS" and asking Trump supporters to sign a petition about Antifa, a far-left group who the president has sought to link with recent violence all over the country.
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Ads garnered millions of views before taken down
The paid ads were sponsored by Trump and vice president Mike Pence and appeared on pages related to Presidents reelection.
The ads targeted all 50 states and garnered millions of views before they were taken down on Thursday.
On trump's page alone, they recorded 950, 000 views and on Pence's page, they garnered 500, 000 impressions before they were taken down.
Team Trump's response
Trump team, in its response, said that the ad was targeted against far-left group Antifa, which trump has called a "domestic terrorist organisation".
"The inverted red triangle is a symbol used by Antifa, so it was included in an ad about Antifa," Tim Murtaugh, a spokesman for the Trump campaign, said in a statement. Though he failed to show any instance where Antifa members used the inverted triangle in any form.
He also added that the symbol is not a part of the Anti-Defamation League( ADL) and that Facebook itself has a similar symbol in thein emojis.
On this, ADL clarified that its "database is not a database of historical Nazi symbols, but of symbols commonly used by modern extremists in the US," CNN reported.
Trump blamed Antifa for protest
Trump has blamed Antifa for causing protest all over the country after an African American man, George Floyd, was killed by a white police officer.
Antifa is a far-left group without any leader that protest against neo-nazis, fascism, white supremacist etc. Recently, it has opposed several of Trump's policies including anti-immigration and anti-Muslims law in the country.
Even though Trump has blamed Antifa for the violent protest, police reports have found a very limited role of the group in the protest.
Trump-social media tension
The move by FB is bound to create tension with Trump's team. Trump has long said that social media giants want to restrict conservative voices on their platforms.
Earlier, in a previous instance, Twitter had put a warning tag on one of Trump's tweet about rioting in Minneapolis-saying it "glorified violence".
Facebook, in contrast, had decided to abstain from being an arbiter of the truth saying the company doesn't want to check the claims. It didn't take down the post saying it didn't violate the company's policy.
But with its recent takedown, Facebook is likely to infuriate the president who had promised to revoke Section 230 -a law that protects social media companies from liability for the online content of the users.
