Facebook has removed President Donald Trump’s re-election advertisement campaign that featured an upside-down red triangle, a symbol once used by Nazis to designate political prisoners, communists and others in concentration camps.
President Trump reportedly spent more than $17,000 on the campaign ads which began running on Wednesday and received hundreds of thousands of impressions.
In a statement Thursday, Facebook said that the campaign messages violated a policy against “organised hate” and were taken down as a result.
A Facebook executive who testified at a House Intelligence Committee hearing on Thursday said the company does not permit symbols of hateful ideology “unless they’re put up with context or condemnation.”
“In a situation where we don’t see either of those, we don’t allow it on the platform and we remove it. That’s what we saw in this case with this ad, and anywhere that that symbol is used, we would take the same action,” Nathaniel Gleicher, the company’s head of security policy, told lawmakers at a hearing.
Facebook’s move comes as it faced intense pressure to remove incendiary comments from the president which critics said promoted violence.
This is coming two weeks after SnapChat announced it would no longer promote President Trump’s account, citing concerns that his public comments could possibly incite violence.
