Facebook removed Trump campaign ads from its site that included an image of an inverted red triangle on Thursday, after critics claimed the shape looked similar to a Nazi concentration camp badge.
While Facebook said it removed the ads for "violating our policy against organized hate," the Trump campaign said the image is used by Antifa, a radical left-wing group that the Trump administration has accused of domestic terrorism.
"The inverted red triangle is a symbol used by Antifa, so it was included in an ad about Antifa," said Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh.
The Trump ads published this week criticized "Dangerous MOBS of far-left groups" that "are DESTROYING our cities and rioting." They also asked Facebook users to sign a campaign petition supporting Trump’s decision to "declare Antifa a Terrorist Organization."
The ads included an image of a red upside-down triangle. In Nazi concentration camps, upside-down triangles of various colors, and other symbols, were used to denote classes of political prisoners.
"We removed these posts and ads for violating our policy against organized hate,"Andy Stone, a spokesman for Facebook, told the Washington Free Beacon. "Our policy prohibits using a banned hate group's symbol to identify political prisoners without the context that condemns or discusses the symbol."
Media Matters for America, a left-wing activist group, called the triangle "an infamous Nazi symbol." The Anti-Defamation League said the symbol "is practically identical to that used by the Nazi regime to classify political prisoners in concentration camps."
Murtaugh, however, said the image is not included in the ADL's database of symbols of hate.
Facebook has been under pressure from Joe Biden and Democratic leaders to change its advertising policy in recent weeks. The Biden campaign has called on the social media platform to put political speech restrictions into place to prevent alleged "misinformation" in Trump ads and posts. Facebook has so far declined to change its policy.
While Biden has ramped up public criticism of Facebook, his campaign’s spending on Facebook ads skyrocketed in June, and he has declined to say if he will return campaign donations from top Facebook executives.