Facebook removes Nazi Trump ads while Twitter flags up 'racist baby' tweet
The Trump administration has been dealt a double blow on social media after Twitter flagged a tweet from the president as "manipulated media" and Facebook remove election ads that featured a Nazi symbol and called for Antifa to be declared a terrorist organization.
On Twitter, Trump retweeted a video labelled as depicting a "racist baby" and made to look like a CNN news clip. In the case of Facebook, an ad that violated the company's policies against organized hate was taken down.
See also:
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- Trump accuses Twitter of 2020 election interference after the platform fact-checks his false tweets
The advertisements on Facebook were part of Trump's 2020 re-election campaign and invited supporters to sign a "STOP ANTIFA" petition. Controversially, the ad featured an inverted red triangle, a symbol infamously used by the Nazis to identify political prisoners in concentration camps during the Holocaust.
A spokesperson for Facebook said:
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.
Twitter's intervention came after Trump retweeted a mocked-up CNN video of two toddlers:
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 19, 2020
The tweet was supposed to be an attack on the "fake news" the president frequently obsesses over, but was itself a warped reframing of a real CNN video, as some were quick to point out:
Here's how CNN actually covered this video https://t.co/tzW7YbygBw
— Adrian D. Garcia (@adriandgarcia) June 19, 2020
The "manipulated media" label slapped on the tweet is Twitter's latest intervention into Trump's stream of tweets and it's unlikely to be well-received. When Trump and Twitter last locked horns, the president threatened to close down social media platforms.
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