Midterm Elections: Facebook Joins NBC, Fox In Pulling Racist Donald Trump Campaign Ad

Networks and online platforms with large amounts of reach are dropping a campaign ad paid for by President Donald Trump because of its racist content. Facebook became the latest company to do so, announcing Monday that the ad violated the social network’s policies against hateful, sensational ads.

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the ad was blocked from paid distribution on the site, per CNBC. Trump’s campaign team spent at least $7,300 to run the ad on Facebook, racking up more than 10 million impressions before Facebook took it down. The president has been one of the top ad buyers on Facebook in 2018.

The infamous ad, which Trump tweeted on Halloween, showed footage of convicted murderer Luis Bracamontes alongside warnings that Democrats would let more undocumented immigrants like him into the country. Bracamontes last came to the United States during the last Republican administration.

The ad has been widely compared to the “Willie Horton” ad that ran during former president George H.W. Bush’s 1988 campaign. That ad also used racial fear to attack a Democratic opponent.

NBC was roundly criticized for running the ad over the weekend. The network ran the ad during “Sunday Night Football,” while Fox showed it several times across its Fox News and Fox Business channels, according to CNN. Both Fox and NBC said they had pulled the ad on Monday.

CNN, meanwhile, never sold airtime to the ad.

“CNN has made it abundantly clear in its editorial coverage that this ad is racist,” the CNN Communications Twitter account posted Saturday. “When presented with an opportunity to be paid to take a version of this ad, we declined. Those are the facts.”

The ad played into Trump’s continued hostile rhetoric towards undocumented immigrants, especially in the weeks leading up to the midterm elections. In order to drum up support for Republican candidates, the president has pushed claims that a large “caravan” of immigrants are heading for the southern border of the U.S.

The Daily Beast reported that even those in Trump’s team know the claims lack hard evidence. Additionally, the president said he wants to end the policy that grants citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants born in the U.S.