Well it's official the joke has gone too far. The Anti-Defamation League has officially named the 4Chan meme "Pepe the frog" as a form of hate speech.
From their press release:
ADL Adds “Pepe the Frog” Meme, Used by Anti-Semites and Racists, to Online Hate Symbols Database Joins Echo, Swastika, and Blood Drop Cross New York, NY, September 27, 2016 … The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today identified “Pepe the Frog,” a cartoon character used by haters on social media to suggest racist, anti-Semitic or other bigoted notions, as a hate symbol. It has been added it to ADL’s online “Hate on Display” database.Full press release available here: http://www.adl.org/press-center/press-releases/extremism/adl-adds-pepe-the-frog-online-hate-symbols-database.html#.V-t3USErJaQAlso referred to as the “sad frog meme,” Pepe the Frog did not originally have anti-Semitic connotations. But as the meme proliferated in online venues such as 4chan, 8chan and Reddit, a subset of memes came into existence promoting anti-Jewish, bigoted and offensive ideas. And those have spread virally on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere.
Pepe Controversy
For those of you scratching your head at WTF this is about and how a weird looking cartoon frog became hate speech here are a few resources:
From Know Your Meme:
On May 26th, 2016, The Daily Beast[31] published an article titled “How Pepe the Frog Became a Nazi Trump Supporter and Alt-Right Symbol.“ The article included an interview with Twitter user @JaredTSwift,[38] identified as an “anonymous white nationalist,” who claimed there was a “campaign to reclaim Pepe from normies” by creating anti-Semitic illustrations of the frog character. “The Deplorables” Parody Poster On September 9th, 2016, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said that half Donald Trump’s supporters were in a “basket of deplorables” during a speech held at a private fundraiser. On September 10th, Donald Trump Jr. posted a photoshopped movie poster on Instagram[23] of the 2010 action film The Expendables, which features various prominent conservatives and Pepe the Frog with the title “The Deplorables” (shown below).The following day, NBC News[24] published an article about the photoshop, which referred to Pepe the Frog as a “popular white nationalist symbol” based on a statement made by Southern Poverty Law Center’s Heidi Beirich. That day, several news sites published articles referring to Pepe as a “white supremacist meme” and “white national symbol,” including The Hill,[25] Vanity Fair,[26] Talking Points Memo[27] and CNN (shown below). On September 12th, a post mocking the NBC article reached the front page of /r/KotakuInAction.[28]
The same day, the official Hillary Clinton presidential campaign blog[30] published a post titled “Donald Trump, Pepe the frog, and white supremacists: an explainer,” which labeled Pepe the Frog as “sinister” and a “symbol associated with white supremacy.” Over the next 24 hours, posts about the Clinton campaign’s reaction reached the front page of various subreddits, including /r/cringe,[37] /r/politics,[32][33] /r/OutOfTheLoop,[34] /r/4chan[35] and /r/The_Donald.[36] In the comments sections, many Redditors mocked the Clinton campaign and the mainstream media for failing to understand the Pepe meme.
Meanwhile, The Daily Dot[29] published an article titled “Pepe the Frog is not a Nazi, no matter what the alt-right says,” stating that “Pepe lacks political affiliation.”
So what do you think? Should Pepe the Frog be listed as a hate symbol? Leave a comment below with your thoughts.