The company said in a statement Thursday that the ads violated “our policy against organized hate." A
“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,"
The Trump campaign spent more than
In a statement, Trump campaign communications director
“But it is ironic that it took a Trump ad to force the media to implicitly concede that Antifa is a hate group," he added.
Antifa is an umbrella term for leftist militants bound more by belief than organizational structure. Trump has blamed antifa for the violence that erupted during some of the recent protests, but federal law enforcement officials have offered little evidence of this.
Some experts disputed that the red triangle was commonly used as an antifa symbol.
European anti-fascist groups initially used the red triangle as a symbol, hoping to reclaim its meaning after World War II, but it is no longer widely used by the movement nor by
The ADL said the triangle was not in its database because it is a historical symbol and the database includes only those symbols used by modern-day extremists and white supremacists.
“Whether aware of the history or meaning, for the Trump campaign to use a symbol — one which is practically identical to that used by the Nazi regime to classify political prisoners in concentration camps — to attack his opponents is offensive and deeply troubling,” ADL chief executive officer
Even with the ads removed,
Those questions arose anew during Thursday's hearing as
“If we simply take a piece of content like this down, it doesn't go away,” Gleicher responded. “It will exist elsewhere on the internet. People who are looking for it will still find it.”
Later Thursday, Twitter labeled a video Trump had posted as “manipulated media.” The president had tweeted a doctored video of two young children with a fake, misspelled
With Thursday's hearing focused on the spread of disinformation tied to the 2020 election, the companies said they had not yet seen the same sort of concerted foreign influence campaigns like the one four years ago, when Russian sowed discord online by playing up divisive social issues.
But that suggests the threat has simply evolved rather than diminished, said the executives, who pointed out that media entities linked to foreign governments were now directly engaging online on American social issues as a way to influence public opinion. Chinese actors, for instance, have likened allegations of police brutality in the
“That shift from platform manipulation to overt state assets is something that we’ve observed," said
The companies say they have accelerated efforts to root out fake accounts. Twitter, for instance, said it had challenged in the first six months of 2019 more than 97 million accounts that showed signs of platform manipulation, and
Preventing disinformation ahead of the election is a significant challenge in a country facing potentially dramatic changes in how people vote, with the expected widespread use of mail-in ballots creating openings to cast doubt on the results and spread inaccurate narratives.
“Providing that accurate information is one of the best ways to mitigate those types of threats,” Gleicher said.
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