Who is Pepe the Frog and why has he become a hate symbol?
Popular internet meme is being used increasingly in hate speech, but creator is more amused by the development
The wider world doesn’t care about OPEC or Deutsche Bank right now – they want to know why a global internet meme called Pepe the Frog has been put on a list of hate symbols.
Pepe the Frog is, as the name suggests, an online cartoon frog character that has become hugely popular around the world since its creation by cartoonist Matt Furie in 2005. But it has now fallen foul of an anti-discrimination watchdog and added to a database of “hate symbols.”
The US-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL) said that Pepe the Frog was being “used by haters on social media to suggest racist, anti-Semitic or other bigoted notions, as a hate symbol” and, as a result, it had taken the decision to add the image to its online database of hate symbols.
This means that Pepe the Frog has now joined an ignominious rank of symbols including the well-known Swatiska and blood drop cross used by the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan respectively, that the ADL has on its “Hate on Display” database.
The story has captured the attention of the world and was one of the top five trending stories on search engine Google on Thursday morning.
The ADL noted that cartoonist Furie created the frog cartoon and gave him the catchphrase “feels good, man” but that the image and phrase had been appropriated by social media users, “turning him into a meme, placing the frog in a variety of circumstances and saying many different things.”