The incumbent President of the United States of America ran now-banned Facebook ads loaded with Nazi references
- Reference: 1592512179
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/06/18/facebook_removes_trump_ads/
- Source link:
The ads, which are said to have been circulating on Facebook since June 3, 2020, claimed that dangerous mobs of left-wing groups are running riot, and urged ad viewers to add their names to a marketing list and donate money to the Trump campaign.
According to Media Matters, the ads were revised on June 17, 2020, to include a red triangle symbol that was used by the Nazis to identify political prisoners in concentration camps. The watchdog group says the Trump campaign ran 88 of these ads yesterday.
The Anti-Defamation League identifies [1]88 as a hate symbol . It's used to refer to the eighth letter of the Latin alphabet, "H," which repeated twice can stand for "Heil Hitler." What's more, the first sentence in these ads is 14 words, also a [2]white supremacist dogwhistle . Quite a coincidence it seems.
“We removed these posts and ads for violating our policy against organized hate," a Facebook spokesperson said in an email to The Register . "Our policy prohibits using a banned hate group's symbol to identify political prisoners without the context that condemns or discusses the symbol.”
The President of the United States is campaigning for reelection using a Nazi concentration camp symbol.
Nazis used the red triangle to mark political prisoners and people who rescued Jews.
Trump & the RNC are using it to smear millions of protestors.
Their masks are off. [3]pic.twitter.com/UzmzDaRBup — Bend the Arc: Jewish Action (@jewishaction) [4]June 18, 2020
This is the first time Trump campaign content has been removed as hate speech. Facebook has previously removed Trump ads for policy violations, such as violating its census interference policy, with Zuckerberg and President Trump [5]apparently in close coordination over the matter.
But the ad biz hasn't been enthusiastic about applying its rules to political content, going so far as to give politicians a license to lie. Its policy [6]states , "Posts and ads from politicians are generally not subjected to fact-checking."
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly defended this stance, which perhaps is not surprising given the amount Trump and his allies spend on Facebook to promote their agenda. Together, Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. and the Trump Make America Great Again Committee have spent over $18m on Facebook ads between January, 2020 and June 15, 2020, [7]according to Facebook .
Staff in a huff, personal call with Trump, picking fights with Twitter, upsetting civil-rights groups – a week in the life of Facebook's Zuckerberg [8]READ MORE
Facebook has allowed Trump and other Republicans to run [9]thousands of ads that have been criticized for fearmongering and falsehoods, alongside [10]hundreds of ads making false claims about voter fraud.
But Facebook, perhaps, has been emboldened by Twitter's decision to flag Trump tweets, something the short message service had resisted until recently, or by Trump's executive order to look for ways to weaken Section 230 immunity for internet services and the subsequent action yesterday [11]by the Justice Department and legislators to limit legal protections.
Slamming down on scraping
In a separate policy clampdown, Facebook on Thursday filed two lawsuits, one in the US and the other in Spain, against individuals alleged to be using unauthorized software in violation of the company's terms of service.
In a [12]blog post , Jessica Romero, director of platform enforcement and litigation, for the data gathering biz, said the defendant in the US lawsuit, Mohammad Zaghar of Morocco, operated a data scraping website where Facebook users could enter their Facebook credentials and have the site collect data not normally available for download, such as the email address, mobile phone number, gender, and date of birth of "friends."
The complaint alleges Zaghar "collected the data by using self-compromised accounts and a computer program to control a network of computers or “bots,” which pretended to be an Android device connected to the official Facebook mobile app."
The harvested data, it's claimed, was stored at Zaghar's website massroot8.com. Such details are commonly used for marketing purposes, specifically lead generation, price competition, and e-commerce optimization.
The complaint against Zaghar accuses him of collecting approximately 5,500 Facebook users' login credentials between April 23, 2020 to May 6, 2020 and scraping data from those accounts. It also claims he has been engaged in such activities for years.
Such information was easily accessible to Facebook developers before the Cambridge Analytica scandal forced the ad biz to rethink programmatic access to its platform and data hoard.
The lawsuit in Spain accused MGP25 Cyberint Services and its founder of distributing software for generating fake "likes" and comments on Instagram.
Facebook declined to make a copy of the complaint filed in Spain available, stating that the lawsuit is not public and the court there does not make it available. ®
PS: More worries for Trump this week: a tell-all book by a former advisor this month [13]claimed the President once said journalists should be "executed," didn't know Britain was a nuclear power, begged China's leaders for help getting reelected, and more.
Sponsored: [14]The Forrester New Wave™: Public Cloud Enterprise Container Platforms, Q3 2019
[1] https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/88
[2] https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/14-words
[3] https://t.co/UzmzDaRBup
[4] https://twitter.com/jewishaction/status/1273482511918616578?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/03/facebook_summary/
[6] https://www.facebook.com/business/help/182222309230722
[7] https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/report
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/03/facebook_summary/
[9] https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-let-trumps-campaign-run-over-2000-ads-referring-immigration-invasion
[10] https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-letting-trump-campaign-publish-least-529-ads-false-claims-voter-fraud
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/18/section230_doj/
[12] https://about.fb.com/news/2020/06/automation-software-lawsuits/
[13] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/17/john-bolton-book-trump-china-dictators-saudi-arabia
[14] https://go.theregister.com/tl/1956/-8475/the-forrester-new-wave-public-cloud-enterprise-container-platforms-q3-2019?td=wptl1956
Lying Sack of Trump
Time to resign.
I'm still not sure how much of this is pulling our leg
88 is "hate"? Because H from *itler is the eight letter?
I find it to make a joke like that to be in very bad taste. I am sure that the ADL and others have much better to do than to police the use or misuse of the number 8
BTW, it used to be that a license plate that said "8" could get a very high return during State auctions, "8" being considered the most lucky number in Chinese culture, and would go attached to a Rolls Royce or better. And now you're telling me that perhaps a car with "8" is not an indicator of some Chinese maffia boss, but a white extremist besides?
at the very least, that is rather weird...
Re: I'm still not sure how much of this is pulling our leg
Apparently everything's a dog whistle. I guess I'm just not a dog, I don't get it either.
Re: I'm still not sure how much of this is pulling our leg
That's because it's not aimed at you. Coded references aren't effective if everybody outside the target group knows about them.
That's why they're called "dog whistles". Because only the targets can hear them (in theory)
Re: I'm still not sure how much of this is pulling our leg
It's been very common in Germany for decades. Since outright SS symbolism is banned there, "88" has been often used as a coded reference by Neo Nazis. The authorities are aware of this, though obviously realise it's stupid to ban a number. But they do for instance not allow you to have '88' on a vehicle number plate.
Re: I'm still not sure how much of this is pulling our leg
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Column_88
https://www.adl.org/education/references/hate-symbols/88
Also
"NS88 Video Division White Power Skinhead CDs DVD Movies Flags Patches ...'
Re: I'm still not sure how much of this is pulling our leg
14 88 is a two-fer foghorn which you either decided to play dumb about or didn't care to Read The Flaming Article.
14 for the fourteen words, the neo-Nazi creed most infamously recited by Canadian nazi Faith Goldy at Charlottesville, a close friend of Lauren "Feast Replacement" Southern. (Lauren went on to attempt mass murder and inspired at least ten mass shooters who quoted her at length in their manifestos, including the New Zealand Shooter.)
88 stands for Heil Hitler.
This number shows up in a lot of alt-right and mainstream American right publications and social media postings. Jack Posobiec, Trump's favorite twitter propagandist, routine makes open references to the numbers 14 and 88.
ICE put out a press release last year fessing up to losing a bunch of detained children. The number in their public statement and quoted by the spokesperson? One thousand, four hundred, and eighty eight. (The number of lost minors, according to internal ICE figures, was 1502.)
It's not a joke
References involving 88, HH, and 14 have been used for [1]years and years to signal white supremacy support to other white supremacists. It's a code, a wink, a nudge to an [2]ideology touted by the likes of Nick Griffin, Richard B. Spencer, and others.
C.
[1] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2008/10/14-and-88-why-white-supremacists-love-the-numbers.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen_Words
to News or not to News
Only no news is bad news in the eyes of politicians.
This is classical trolling and trapping to get attention. Then you can alter the narrative to your own liking and "blame" someone else. Which war was it now? The one with east Asia or the the other one we've always been involved in?
The more attention we give to the "outrage" the more we feed the troll. Not that we should ignore it, but you need to tackle the problem and not the symptom(s). The symptoms are easily mutated and redirected by the troll and can (will) be used to alter the narrative. Tackle the problem and you remove the symptoms without feeding the troll. You simply have to starve the troll of possible narratives.
They actually have a plan...
I firmly believe that this is a deliberate ploy by aspects of the Republican party to lose the next election... they see the tide turning against them and the global recession coming... and they don;t want to be in charge whilst it's happening. That way we'll just see another wave of hate and bile blaming those 'socialist/libtards' for everything that's gone wrong in the country.
I don't think they've bothered to actually inform Trump of this though.
Me... cynical... who saw the exact same thing happen in 2010 in the UK where Labour seemingly threw away their chances to win by portraying their leader as a bigot... Coincidence... maybe not. :)
Re: They actually have a plan...
Trump won't yield so easily. And if Bolton's kiss 'n' tell is only half true then I'm sure Donald is trying to figure out how to strike down the 22nd Amendment.
What is scariest..
... is that I'm so numb to all this shit now.
Waiting for the Trump campaign to claim they were using it as a symbol of family planning.