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posted by martyb on Sunday July 22 2018, @02:58PM   Printer-friendly
from the Boiling-Frogs-,-seriously dept.

The Daily Beast reports The Creator of Pepe is Winning his War on the Alt-Right:

Matt Furie had no idea a stoned frog he posted on Myspace would be co-opted by Nazis. Now he’s on a mission to reclaim his infamous work.

Matt Furie drew the alt-right’s favorite cartoon frog. Now he is leading one of the most successful legal campaigns against the racist right.

More than a decade has passed since Furie first drew a stoned-looking frog named “Pepe” and uploaded it to Myspace. The frog rose from MySpace in-joke to popular meme, before being taken up as an unofficial mascot of internet neo-Nazis during the 2016 presidential primaries. Since then, Furie has been leading a campaign to reclaim his creation, filing copyright infringement complaints against white nationalist Richard Spencer, conspiracy news site InfoWars,[sic]

This week he won another battle, pressuring neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer into deleting most of their Pepes, as Motherboard reported.

Though a cartoon frog might seem an unlikely mascot for the racist right, a leaked version of The Daily Stormer’s style guide explains the strategy.

“The tone of the site should be light,” reads the style guide, which leaked to HuffPost last year. “Most people are not comfortable with material that comes across as vitriolic, raging, non-ironic hatred. The unindoctrinated should not be able to tell if we are joking or not … This is obviously a ploy and I actually do want to gas kikes.”

Recognizable memes like Pepe are an easy stand-in for humor.

“We basically mixed Pepe in with Nazi propaganda, etc. We built that association,” a white supremacist Twitter user told The Daily Beast in 2016 of the campaign to make Pepe a gateway meme to the alt-right.

Furie was initially casual about the frog’s incorporation into meme culture.

“I get emails pretty regularly, from kids, from high schools, who need my permission to use Pepe in their senior shirts, or their clarinet club, or their photography clubs,” Furie told The Atlantic in 2016. “I tell them to go ahead as long as they sell me a shirt.”

But soon Pepes proliferated across sites like The Daily Stormer, prompting the Anti-Defamation League to designate the cartoon as a hate symbol, and inspiring Furie to lawyer up.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 22 2018, @04:15PM (10 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 22 2018, @04:15PM (#710794)

    I'll add another vote to keep this site free of the agitprop that pollutes the rest of the internet.
    This is a story about nothing whose only purpose is to rile people ip.

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    Total Score:   3  
  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday July 23 2018, @01:13AM (9 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 23 2018, @01:13AM (#710982) Journal

    I'll add another vote to keep this site free of the agitprop that pollutes the rest of the internet.

    Do you have any way of doing it without stepping into the censorship zone? How about keeping this site free of ethanol-fueled racist/antisemitic rants?
    What a general interest forum ("Soylentnews is people") has to gain by offering a "protective bubble" against a whole world flooded by agitprop?

    (careful what you wish for)

    --
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
    • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday July 23 2018, @01:52AM (8 children)

      Comments and journals are free speech. Articles are consensus-driven and always have been. If most of the community decides they want clickbait and crap journalism, that's what will be published. This is not currently the case though.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
      • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday July 23 2018, @02:23AM (5 children)

        by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 23 2018, @02:23AM (#711016) Journal

        If most of the community decides they want clickbait and crap journalism, that's what will be published.

        Just from curiosity: how is this "want" actually gauged?
        I wasn't able to find a way in which feedback specific to submission can be send by the community, is there anything not relying on the subjective feeling of guts of the editors?

        --
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
        • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday July 23 2018, @02:41AM (4 children)

          Severity, breadth, and vehemence of bitching.

          --
          My rights don't end where your fear begins.
          • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday July 23 2018, @03:01AM (3 children)

            by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 23 2018, @03:01AM (#711034) Journal

            So no objective way.

            --
            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
            • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday July 23 2018, @10:37AM (2 children)

              That's objective. Three defined data points. It's not my problem most everyone disagrees with filling the site with clickbait and crap journalism. It's just something you're going to have to live with.

              --
              My rights don't end where your fear begins.
              • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday July 23 2018, @11:43AM (1 child)

                by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Monday July 23 2018, @11:43AM (#711173) Journal

                That's objective. Three defined data points.

                That's bullshit and you know it. Data points? Show me numbers.

                --
                https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
      • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday July 23 2018, @06:23AM (1 child)

        by aristarchus (2645) on Monday July 23 2018, @06:23AM (#711083) Journal

        Articles are consensus-driven and always have been.

        Says the bastard buzzard that is the starting point for the banning of aristarchus submissions? There is no consensus, except among a very small clique of editors, and TMB, who have a particular bent that goes against the consensus of the site. I, or rather, We, say it again: #freearistarchus!!!. It is what all the cool kids are doing now.