Anti-Defamation League Declares Pepe the Frog a Hate Symbol (time.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TIME: The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has declared a popular internet meme depicting a cartoon frog to be a hate symbol. Pepe the Frog's beginnings were unoffensive: he is the creation of comic book creator Matt Furie, who featured the frog as a character in the series Boy's Club beginning in 2005. The character subsequently became a beloved meme, often called the "sad frog meme" and shared with a speech bubble reading "Feels good man" or "Feels bad man." But recently, as the Daily Beast reported in May, the character has been co-opted by a faction of Internet denizens who decided to reclaim it from the mainstream, and began sharing it in anti-Semitic contexts. "Images of the frog, variously portrayed with a Hitler-like mustache, wearing a yarmulke or a Klan hood, have proliferated in recent weeks in hateful messages aimed at Jewish and other users on Twitter," the ADL wrote in a statement. "Once again, racists and haters have taken a popular Internet meme and twisted it for their own purposes of spreading bigotry and harassing users," wrote ADL CEO Jonathan A. Greenblatt.

Comments

Who said what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who the fuck is the ADL? Why the fuck do I give a shit?

-- Internet

Re:Who said what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Internet hate has been growing for a long time now.

At basically the same rate non-techies have started adopting the internet in their every day lives I suspect.
The internet was a nice place before all the normals started using it.

Re:Who said what?

[Opportunist]

As opposed to getting in line and do what the outraged, loudmouthed minority says?

Re:Who said what?

[Mashiki]

You want to know what's really funny? If you read the actual ADL post on it, it actually says Pepe isn't a racist meme. It says that some people use it for such, but that doesn't make it so. Anymore then using something else in a meme context. Fuck the media is really trying to push this bullshit hard. So are the retards like the AC that /. promoted this worthless bunch of articles on in the first place. Can't get much more pathetic, and when you hear people talking about this? They're laughing at you, even the normies.

From the ADL itself:

However, because so many Pepe the Frog memes are not bigoted in nature, it is important to examine use of the meme only in context. The mere fact of posting a Pepe meme does not mean that someone is racist or white supremacist. However, if the meme itself is racist or anti-Semitic in nature, or if it appears in a context containing bigoted or offensive language or symbols, then it may have been used for hateful purposes.

Re:Who said what?

[Maritz]

I'm no ADL fan, but this is from their website:

"However, because so many Pepe the Frog memes are not bigoted in nature, it is important to examine use of the meme only in context. The mere fact of posting a Pepe meme does not mean that someone is racist or white supremacist. However, if the meme itself is racist or anti-Semitic in nature, or if it appears in a context containing bigoted or offensive language or symbols, then it may have been used for hateful purposes."

Kinda makes you look stupid going off on that rant, to be honest.

Re:We live in that environment now.

[K. S. Kyosuke]

What's worse, PC Nazis or Mac Communists?

Star of David used by Neo Nazis...

[hsthompson69]

...and then we can declare that a hate symbol too?

What about the rainbow flag? If sharia enforcing islamists start using rainbow colors, can we declare that a hate symbol?

What about the word "HATE"? Can we declare that a hate symbol, and ban it?

WTF, guys, seriously?

Re:We live in that environment now.

[stealth_finger]

Watt about the grammer Nazi's?

Grammar Nazis.

There ok.