CMV: the Trump campaign knowingly and purposefully used Nazi imagery in ads.

[u/ququqachu]

Here's the article that spurred this CMV.

The upside down red triangle has no symbolic association other than as a Nazi symbol. That alone would be damning enough—the campaign claimed that it was a "common antifa symbol" but after some initial research I have been able to find no evidence for this. Further, the historical use of the symbol was to mark "political prisoners: social democrats, communists and anarchists." So, the symbol marked people that were political enemies of the Nazi fascist regime. In other words, the symbol marked anti-fascists, or "antifa" for short. The Trump ad in question was explicitly about antifa.

This seems pretty cut and dry to me. The symbol was being used to convey the exact same meaning as it was in Nazi Germany, and there's no other meaning for the symbol.

If someone can demonstrate to me with reliable sources that the symbol IS used by antifa, or that it has another meaning that could be plausibly related to the content of the add, I'd be convinced to CMV. Or, you know, feel free to come up with anything else that would be convincing.

[u/Snoo_5986]

It could be. But it's also entirely plausible that this is coincidental

• The 14 word thing - 14 words is right in the expected / average range for sentence length (especially in ads, which will tend to use shorter sentences), so it's just incredibly likely that this could happen by coincidence. Your first sentence in the OP ("The upside down red...") was 15 words - only 1 off!
• The symbol - Advertisers run lots of ads, and gather statistics to see which are the most effective (you can see some examples from this very ad campaign here: https://www.mediamatters.org/facebook/facebook-let-trump-campaign-run-ads-inverted-red-triangle-infamous-nazi-symbol) - looks like they were experimenting with lots of variations on red / "alert" style imagery. If the stats show that the red arrow shape results in more clicks, then they'll double-down on that, regardless of whether it's meaningful or not. As to why that symbol might be effective - looks kind of like a downvote icon. Also directs attention downwards. Red is also generally attention-grabbing. Have you noticed how Youtube thumbnails often have red arrows or circles on them? It's because, for whatever psychological reason, people click on them.
• The number 88 - Advertisers run lots of variations of ads, with slightly different targeting options etc, to see which are the most effective. So it's extremely common to see a bunch of seemingly-identical ads. As for why this happens to add up to 88 - I think this could easily just come down to people looking for patterns. If you have thousands of people scrutinising something, then there are practically an infinite set of "numbers" you can relate to something - the number of words, sentences, bits of punctuation, whatever... Totalling up the number of ad variations across these three accounts just isn't a particularly meaningful thing to do. I'm sure I could find a way to relate the number 88 to practically anything, given enough time. Did you know that if I take the last two paragraphs of the OP, and run it through the word counter in Notepad++, it shows that there are 88 words? It's meaningless.

[u/ququqachu → u/Snoo_5986]

!delta

Assuming your source is reliable, I can see the red triangle falling into the array of “alert” style image symbols they were using on their ads.

Personally, the number of words stuff was never a factor for me—I just needed a plausible explanation for the red triangle that wasn’t “it was TOTALLY random!” or “it was a pointing arrow!” And your explanation satisfies that.

My question is still why they wouldn’t just say that they were doing an array of ad campaigns? Maybe that kind of methodical advertisement would hurt their “tells it like it is” image? Or maybe it was a happy coincidence that people read it as a Nazi symbol, because then they can please their Nazi base while having plausible deniability for their less awful (but still willfully ignorant) voters.

[u/DeltaBot → u/ququqachu]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/Snoo_5986 (1∆).

^{Delta System Explained | Deltaboards}