I do not know this story, but am just going on what you wrote and reported here.

Firstly the symbol that he made, and the ones that you printed at the bottom are different. The top one made by the navy guy you can see that his palm is facing inwards. Whereas the bottom ones their palms are all facing outwards.

This would be like in England if you flick the V sign at someone with palm facing towards them, it means peace. With the back of your hand faced towards them it means fuck off.

Secondly you reported that

The latest hilarious attempt resulted in a hardworking person in the navy, being suspended from his duties!

Yet later in the same article we see the caption in the picture you posted which says:

[...] gets kicked off hurricane response team.

With a further caption below saying that he has been kicked off that particular response team. Which is very different from being suspended from duties.

....

As I was writing this reply I thought I'd check into your 4chan claim and came up with two interesting links.

The first was a rather stale Wiki link saying that the symbol had been used as a white supremacist symbol.

I then checked another one for balance and saw the whole 4chan story.

However my question would be this; if somebody deliberately tries to fool the media by putting out fake news stories about the symbol and then people actually start using it. Is that the fault of the media being fooled or the person deliberately trying to fool them?

It's an interesting question, because I'm fairly sure that if the 4chan thing was done the other way round (i.e. a leftwing prank to fool the rightwing media), it would annoy a fair few people including yourself.

What do you think?

Cg