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I have a theory about this... https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/06/18/trump-campaign-runs-ads-with-marking-once-used-by-nazis-designate-political-prisoners/?utm_campaign=wp_main&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter
So a big part of right-wing troll culture centers on dogwhistles: something that regular people would see and think, "I don't see what the problem is," but has a less wholesome meaning underneath. For instance, the "OK" hand gesture stuff.
If you point out that the sign sort of became a way to show you're part of a pro-Trump in-group even before the 2016 election (before 4chan did anything, ftr), people go, "Oh, is THIS person doing that?" and send pictures of celebrities making the sign to literally say "OK."
Another one was when some white supremacists started making signs saying "It's OK to be white." If people point out that it's white supremacists putting these signs up, the reaction they were trying to get was for people to go, "Wait, you DON'T think it's ok?"
Basically, to make it seem like liberals are paranoid, easily offended, and see Nazis everywhere they look. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/11/03/its-okay-to-be-white-signs-and-stickers-appear-on-campuses-and-streets-across-the-country/
Remember this image from the 2016 campaign?
People saw that and said, "Hey, that's a picture of a Star of David on top of a pile of cash," to which Trump acted shocked and insisted that it was a "Sheriff's Star"
But it came from a fringy right-wing message board and was watermarked with the name of an account that spent the 2016 campaign tweeting non-stop antisemitic memes. Examples here: https://www.mic.com/articles/147711/donald-trump-s-star-of-david-hillary-clinton-meme-was-created-by-white-supremacists
So the "Oh my god, it's JUST a regular star. You're seeing things. You're losing it." is almost always the reaction.
So on FB, they ran variations on an ad calling antifa terrorists (antifa being completely undefined by the campaign, so who knows who they consider part of it or not). None of the images make much sense. A tiny "slow" sign? A red triangle? A yellow exclamation mark?
So some people on Twitter point out that the downward facing red triangle was a symbol Nazis used to label political enemies/prisoners. https://twitter.com/jewishaction/status/1273482511918616578
The predictable response here is for the campaign to try to argue that it was mean to symbolize a "yield" sign, which would go along with the "caution" and yellow exclamation mark ads.
They could have used a yield sign, but they didn't.
They could have used a yield sign, but they didn't.
But, and here's where my theory kicks in...
I think their hope is to get Facebook to take down the ad, saying it violated their rules (even though it stopped running). And here's why.
It's expensive to run ads. But media coverage is free. If FB flags their ad, the campaign will come out with a big statement about "censorship," "tech bias," etc. It feeds an existing narrative of theirs.
Conservatives have been doing this for a while. Ryan Holiday wrote about how he used to use this tactic to promote the author Tucker Max by putting up purposely inflammatory ads and then created a controversy by inventing opposition to them/demanding they be taken down.
In Holiday's example, he a.) didn't end up having to pay for the ad because it got taken down, and b.) got WAY more exposure in earned media than he would have ever gotten by the ad itself. https://observer.com/2017/02/i-helped-create-the-milo-trolling-playbook-you-should-stop-playing-right-into-it/
It's all a way of gaming the Streisand Effect.
So last year when Twitter decided not to let campaigns advertise on the site (and heavily restrict all political ads), I wrote about why that was a smart move if only because Republicans will keep trying to do things to get their stuff taken down, then scream "bias!" when it does
In any case, here's what the Trump campaign is saying that it is: https://twitter.com/TrumpWarRoom/status/1273638672810815490
I don't claim to have any clue what they did or didn't mean by that ad, just that this sort of stuff is part of the wider playbook they pull from.
And now we wait for the campaign to put out the inevitable “this is proof of bias” statement https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/18/tech/facebook-trump-ads-triangle-takedown/index.html
